My name is Reid Abbott and I am interning with Alberici’s automotive market as a project engineer this summer in Motor City, USA! I was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas (Yes, Toto and I are aware we are not in Kansas anymore!) and am entering my final year in the architectural engineering program at the University of Kansas – Rock Chalk!
Alberici is the third company I have interned for. I first interned at a civil engineering firm in Wichita, where I was tasked with putting together utility concept plans for subdivisions and general site planning for subdivisions such as grading out streets and earthwork for drainage. This was a great learning experience and while I learned a lot and very much enjoyed the challenging work, I knew it was time to seek a career path that would allow me to work in the field.The following year I set out for Austin, Texas to work for a mid-size contractor on a middle school renovation. There, I had the opportunity to handle the scheduling of subcontractors, oversaw site logistics, and ran the majority of day to day operations on my site. It was a great experience to have been given such a large amount of responsibility with such little experience in the field (zero experience, actually).
However, after thinking about my engineering education and how I wanted to apply it in my career, I decided that schools just weren’t going to cut it for me – I had a thirst for bigger and more complex projects. Andthat is where Alberici stepped in. Alberici having such a large and diverse volume of projects going on all over the world was a major factor in me pursuing this internship. I will forever call Kansas my home, but the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone and see what the rest of the country has to offer was too good to pass up – I am loving Michigan so far!
It seems like it has already been a few weeks since the intern orientation in St. Louis. The orientation was very beneficial to me. Having the opportunity to learn about Alberici on a much deeper level was awesome- hearing from company executives like John Smith, Greg Kozicz, and John Alberici really helped put the company culture and history into prospective and made me even more proud to be interning at Alberici this summer. After a short 16-hour drive from St. Louis (due to a 5-hour delay caused by one of the wheels on my truck almost flying off), I arrived safely in Detroit, Michigan. I have been on the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant site for a few days now, working with the project team in the field. The automotive market is everything I had expected and more – fast paced, numbers driven, and unpredictable. I have already been able to walk through general assembly and the paint shop and they did not disappoint – I have never seen anything like it before. I hope to gain a better understanding of the automotive industry and beyond that basically be a sponge and absorb as much information as possible. If I can learn something new every day it will be a successful internship!
I’d like to give a huge shout out to my supervisor, Aaron Walsh, as well as Tim Rosemann in Alberici’s Employee Services department for all their efforts in putting this internship experience together. Aaron has done a great job of helping me get orientated and familiarized with the new territory. Being a huge baseball fan, it only took me 10 days in Detroit before I caught a Tigers game with Aaron. I have even been able to get a couple rounds of golf in already. I am very much looking forward to the rest of the summer here in Michigan and plan on approaching the summer with a “work hard, play hard” mentality! Thank you to the Alberici team in Detroit for welcoming me, I am looking forward to working with all of you in the coming months.