PennDesign’s first externship program launched this October. This is an exciting opportunity to get work experience and exposure to a variety of architectural offices.

An externship is a week to two week long work or shadowing opportunity typically completed during school breaks (winter or spring). In comparison an internship is a longer, typically 3 months or more, work or shadowing opportunity typically completed during summer breaks.  While internships are paid, externships may or may not be paid. This is inpart due to the shorter time length and the amount of work you’d produce for a firm in that time.

Since externships are shorter they are much better for understanding general work environment, skills to focus on developing further, and your specific interests (commercial versus residential work, etc). An externship gives you the opportunity to identify what to refine to better open doors for yourself in future.

This year PennDesign held an open lecture introducing the externship program. 14-22 firms cooperated with PennDesign to create externship opportunities. The two page application in addition to a resume and 3 MB max portfolio were due on October 10th.

In this application process getting the portfolio to 3 MB was really important. I flattened, saved as, exported as, and compressed my portfolio file a million times it seemd. At first the downsaves made large leaps. The last “handful” resulted in miniscule progress of .1 kb each time. Seriously save time to save to the right size. Exporting as and adjusting the downsampling rates can save the portfolio as a smaller size but still beautiful graphics as opposed to compressing which can make very pixelated portfolios. For future looking into saving files at a high quality but small file size will definitely be helpful.

It has been a long wait and is nearly over! This last week of november Career Services will be emailing out the results of firm and student matches. I am hopeful and eager to get to work!

Updates to come when results are in.