Q&A: An Inside Look at the Halff Internship Experience (Part 2)

Inside Halff 08-03-2017

Halff seeks to provide internships full of customized learning opportunities for college students each summer. To achieve this goal, the Halff intern experience focuses on three important methods of learning:

1. Learn by doing: Interns work with professionals on active project assignments to conduct meaningful work for our clients.

2. Learn from individuals: Halff provides three “Halff Chat” cards to each of the interns at the beginning of the internship program. These cards are good for one-on-one lunches with any Halff employee an intern may choose. The lunch meetings are designed for the employee to share more information about Halff and his or her practice, while the intern can ask questions about the employee’s career path and experiences in the industry.

3. Learn through formal training: Halff prepares four training sessions to help interns learn more about what they want to do with their careers. These training sessions occur throughout the summer.

Read on to get to know Mynor from the Richardson office and see what he learned from working at Halff this summer. 

Major: Civil Engineering

University: Texas Tech

Hometown: Las Vegas, Nevada

Favorite artist: Ariana Grande

Favorite food: Stuffed crust pizza from Pizza Hut.

Why did you choose to complete a summer internship at Halff?

More than anything, it’s employee-owned. [Halff] really looks after the employees because it cares about them.

What was your favorite moment or experience?

Surprising my mentor Mason Flanagan. He asked me to do a little bit of work and I did it. Instead of just doing the minimum, I tried to really clean it up and make it look good and get it as detailed and accurate as I could. He was like, “Oh, did you do this?” And I was like, “Yeah, I did.” He said, “What about this?” “Yep, I did that.” And he said, “Oh, OK. … Wow, good job!”

What was your favorite training session and why?

The [one about the] services Halff offers because, I mean, there are a lot of other departments here, and the session described how they work with your department and how their work relates to your department.

Who did you spend your “Halff Chat” cards on? What did you learn?

I used one on Mason. It was his birthday and I wanted to say ‘thank you’ for dealing with me. I learned a lot about MicroStation, which is the software we use to do all of our designs and basically get the best cost estimate analysis. [Mason] showed me how they use it, why they use it, and how everything they do leads to the final design. The second [card] was for one of our team leads, Jeremy McGahan. So I’ve used two so far, and I’ll use my third one soon.

How has this experience shaped what you want to do after graduation?

I know I want to do transportation, for sure. I know I want to work here, for sure.

What’s the biggest takeaway for you from this internship?

The experience of working with real engineering projects and actually having some sort of input, so the next time I’ll be working on an engineering project I’ll have a better understanding of what to do and how to do it.