TimHaahs

My name is Eun Young (Esther) Ko, an upcoming Senior majoring in Architecture Design in Maryland Institute College of Arts. During the summer of 2018, I worked as intern for TimHaahs located in Pennsylvania, USA. TimHaahs is a multi-disciplined engineering and architectural design firm that provides planning design services to create parking and mixed used facilities. The company specializes in developing unique and effective parking strategies to create attractive, vibrant and sustainable communities.

As a student who is wishing to have as much experience in different fields in architecture, I started looking for architectural firms specializing in something totally different than the companies I had worked for before. Fortunately, I was able to watch a documentary about TimHaahs that mainly designed parking structure that I never thought of. For this reason, I decided to apply for TimHaahs internship during summer 2018. After doing some research and visiting the company’s website, I contacted the Human Resource team. After a couple of days, TimHaahs quickly gave a response asking to submit a resume and a portfolio. After exchanging emails and submitting the required works, I was told to come in the Pennsylvania office for an interview. Exactly after a week, I was accepted to work as an intern for 11 weeks.

While I worked as an intern, I was able to experience working in an architectural firm in the United States when I have only previously worked in South Korea. During the internship program that was a little over two months, I was able to work on more than 5 projects that were presented to the real clients that is also planned to be built in real life. As an undergrad student, it was a great opportunity to learn and experience working on varies projects in a short period of time. The company trained me on ways of thinking

of different design ideas for a parking structure and what realistic facts we should have in mind to make the design come true. Through the experience, I was able to know the traits of doing coordination of a project as a leader and now I feel confident on bringing people together and organizing a project.

I feel fortunate that I had another opportunity to work as an intern before senior year of college. I believe the summer before senior year is a very important period where I should be thinking more deeply about what I want to do in the future. The working experience successfully helped me to think more in depth and I plan to continuously think until the end the year. In MICA, I wish to finish the last year strong and create projects that talk about my architectural passion.