Weigand Construction Internship (2011)

Parkview Fly Over Video


Following the completion of my sophomore year at Purdue I began my second internship.  My internship was with Weigand Construction, which is a general contractor based out of Fort Wayne, Indiana.  I am from the town North of Fort Wayne, so this was a great opportunity for me in that aspect as well.  The position I held was an Assistant Project Manager and was placed on two separate job sites during the week.  It worked out where I was working on the Adams Central Community Schools K-12 job  in Monroe, Indiana, once a week and spending the additional four days at Parkview Regional Medical Center in Fort Wayne.

The Adams Central job was both a renovation and new construction.  Over the last several years Adams Central has added on and also renovated other parts of their school, but for this job they want to focus mainly on the High School areas of the building.  We updated all the corridors, mechanical/electrical/plumbing systems, added new office space, renovated the library, classrooms and exterior finishes.  The largest part of the job was tearing down an existing wing of the school and having a new construction in its place to house classrooms, common space, bathrooms and a concession stand.  Some of my responsibilities while I was on site were to update the drawings, maintain RFI's, perform inspections, pick up materials, sit in on meetings and assisted in the estimations of a concession stand and gym renovation.


The Parkview job was a completely different setting.  The overall budget for the Parkview job was nearly $600M, and required at it's peak 1000 workers on-site.  Weigand was in a Joint Venture (JV) with Pepper Construction on this job.  When Parkview placed this job out to bid they wanted a local contractor to team up with a national contractor for the purposes of having the local knowledge and workforce but at the same time having a national contractor that has done a job of this caliber before.  The unique part of this job for Weigand employee's, including myself, was that there were people working as part of the construction management team under the JV's responsibilities but also Weigand self performed a lot of the work themselves.  In turn Weigand was acting as a sub-contractor and the construction manager.  Having the opportunity to see both dynamics of management at one job was extremely interesting and informative for me.


I was working for the Weigand team acting as a sub-contractor for the most part, but would help the JV team if needed.  What we were responsible for was all casework, doors & hardware, wall protection, masonry, site concrete and signage concrete bases.  I was working directly under a project manager overseeing these areas of work and a superintendent as well.  Some of my responsibilities I had for the duration of Summer were to maintain the updated drawings, research and maintain an RFI Log, keeping track and logging materials in place for casework, and updating production reports.  I created many of the logs I was using during the summer and they got passed on to others in the field and office to stay on schedule.  I also worked directly with manufactures and subs on delivery dates, missing items, and special circumstances.  I also was responsible for doing quality control check list prior to punch list dates to ensure that our work was completed in a timely and professional manner.  I sat in on several different levels of meetings on site including internal productivity meetings and quarterly meetings.  At the end of my internship I was also responsible for doing an estimate of the wood blocking for the roof of an additional medical office building that was being added to the contract.


My experience with Weigand really gave me amazing practice with working with others.  I was working directly with people in the trailer and on site daily in efforts to track materials and their placement rates.  I also was able to become much better at communicating through e-mail and phone as a manager and leader of those I was contacting.  Overall, there are so many intangibles that I have been blessed to take away from the experiences I had over my time at Weigand.