My first internship

This summer I took a two-months long internship in Beijing. I put my resume and portfolio on a recruiting website and received three offers from across the country. I chose the one in Beijing because it is closer to my home city, and Beijing is our capital.

The company I worked for is an American architecture consultancy which hads a Chinese branch in Beijing. As an architecture student I thought the work would be similar to what I did in the at university. However the fact is that it was in fact quite different. For instance, I didn’t get much involved in much the designing work of which I did a lot at school. Even though architecture has been my major in university, I am still too young to design something on my own. I need more practice and experience.

The main things I did in the office were collecting information for the architects, translating documents, and drawing CAD or Sketch-up. Drawing CAD was the toughest one. It took me hours to finish one drawing and usually I had to revise it due to the change of a change in the design. It happened to me twice that I worked On two occassions I had to work till until midnight to get the work done. I also twice worked on weekends twice when there were some urgent projects in the office.

The most interesting part of the work for me was the language interpreting in during the meetings. I have studied in UK for two years so I spoke better English than anybody else in the office. This gave me the chance to attend some meetings as an interpreter. The interpreting part was very hard. I had to keep alert all the time during the meetings and pass by on the information as quickly as possible. I realized that I couldn’t translate everything so for each sentence I adopted to pick the most important part and deliver it. It was nerve-racking when everybody kept silent waiting for you to speak and , but I managed to do it. I felt a real sense of accomplishment every time the meeting ended.

I learnt much about things which don't look aren't directly related to architecture, like communicating with co-workers and leaders. I also got to know things like how to negotiate or coordinate with clients, the construction team and estate developers which I wouldn’t learn at school. I felt lucky to work in an office where colleagues help one another and are friendly to people. They were always ready to answer my questions and and address my concerns.

I have definitely built up confidence from this internship. I had a good look at the architecture this industry and became more interested in it than ever. I have started to picture myself as an architect one day.

Good work!

I just corrected some minor things to make it sound more like a native speaker.
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