AME Design Group

My summer at AME Design Group was my first time working at a desk rather than on a shop floor. I joined the MEP design team as a mechanical engineering intern, working on building ventilation and plumbing design under an engineering mentor.

Construction engineering runs on knowledge that isn't taught in a classroom: code compliance, coordination between trades, and the design conventions each building type carries. I supported my mentor on projects as different as a radiopharmaceutical facility and a self-storage development, which sit at opposite ends of the MEP spectrum. Different areas of the radiopharmaceutical facility had to hold ISO 7 and ISO 8 cleanroom classifications, which drove air quality and filtration requirements back into the air handling units, from MERV 8 prefilters at the unit through terminal HEPA filtration at the space. Self-storage carries almost none of that. Ventilation and thermal control come down to code minimums and the building envelope.

After showing I could take on unfamiliar tasks by working from documentation and precedent projects, I was given work outside my original scope. The largest was modeling 53 Revit families for an advanced manufacturing project with the process team, from large industrial dryers to heat exchangers for a water reclamation system. The process team's layout work depended on those models, so the schedule ran through me. I delivered them on time, coordinating with the process engineers as specifications changed.