WEEK 7 – Intern Site Tour & Estimates – COURTNEY ILER

Good Morning!
Hopefully everyone had a safe Fourth of July! It was a rough one, being in he middle of the week.
This week started off with a visit to the Michigan Laborers Training Institute in Perry, MI. This would be my second visit here, in college I attended a NAWIC, National Association of Women in Construction, meeting at this facility. During the meeting, they just gave us a short little tour of the facility and explained what they do there. But on this trip we learned so much more. We were given a ‘snapshot’ of the day in the life of a laborer, and the training they would go through.
We started the day learning about concrete burns, and how to prevent them. It was crazy to see some of the burns these workers received just from doing their everyday job. When we become complacent, that is when accident happen. Next we learned about silica. Woah is there a lot to know about that! But the instructors kept us interested and interactive with the worksheets they had us compete, they really helped me retain the information. Did you know that a respirable crystalline silica particles are smaller then the diameter of human hair! That is tiny!!!! The training was wrapped up with a quick PPE talk. Learned where to find our born on dates for our hard hats and what all the mumble jumble of letters on our safety glasses mean. We ended the trip with a tour. It is an eye opener to me to see what all these laborers go through to learn the in and outs of the jobs. We spent 8 hours there, they spend 40 hours per subject sometimes! These visits allow us as future Project Managers to understand the bidding of a project and the different items that need to be included in the estimate to cover these activities.
Besides this informational tour, I also was in the main office yesterday helping develop a preliminary schedule for a potential project. There are so many documents that need to be reviewed when starting a job and every job is different. From the drawings to the specification, cant forget about the addendum’s, the estimate itself and all the subs quotes. We had to call the subs up to get scope duration’s so we could develop the schedule, and with the way the job is phased, some of these duration’s take twice as long as they would on a straight forward job. Its fun tying to manipulate the tasks and make the schedule flow properly.
I’m really enjoying all the knowledge I am gaining from this internship, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the summer holds