A Week of Thanks


I had the privilege of hosting my family this Thanksgiving in my apartment in Philadelphia. Seven people all snuggled together under one roof for a full week!

While we may not have hit every tourist trap in the city we did manage a few rides around the city to see the sights. We ventured out to see the school, the markets around town, the christmas market, El Rey for tacos, Home Depot for flowers, and out to the countryside. After a long day out warm nights inside sharing meals and warm hot chocolate around a movie reminded me of days back home.

The quiteness of the apartment after a week activity is unnerving. I enjoy the chaos and bussyness that it is having a full house. Something is always going on. It is just the kind of lively that keeps my mind buzzing and my heart happy. As I am sure it does with everyone this time of year. I hope everyone had a happy holiday!

Externship Excitement! Application Process


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.