Day 13, 12/11/13

This week had me doing quite a bunch of things. It started with me doing some research for one of my mentors. A session or two ago, I spoke of how I had to get dimensions for a loading zone. Well, the people who commissioned that project wanted to add something called heat tracers. Well, my mentor didn’t have too much experience with heat tracers, so he asked me to research them. Find out what they are, how they work, price, different companies that offer them and all that jazz. Then save anything that I find to a place so that my mentor can find it easily. Turns out that heat tracers are wires that can be put on things like gutters, pipes, or in concrete in order to keep them warm so that any snow that fails on it will naturally melt. And with a loading dock, one could easily understand the benefit. You put in the stuff when making the zone and then you never have to worry about snow stopping or slowing down your operation. After that, I went to a lunch training session were they were talking about grading. Grading is how steep you make a zone when building it. Basically, certain things have to be a certain slopes so that it is easily usable but not crazy expensive. So, you could have 2% grade which would mean that the ground goes up 2 degrees starting at the horizontal. Another example is a 2:1 grade which means for every one foot horizontally you go up 2 feet vertically. The session talked a lot about being efficient with your time and grading your site properly so that you don’t have to go back to your drawings endlessly. The day ended with doing so more research for another one of my mentors. He is doing a project in Stormking, NY. There is a boarding school of sorts there and they have a problem with Ammonia and Phosphorous getting into the wastewater there. So, my task was to look up things about Ammonia and Phosphorous and how to prevent it from getting into nature; all sorts of tips and tricks and the like. Afterwards, like the previous thing, I had to compile my information and send it to my mentor. That was pretty much the entire day. Have a happy holidays.

Day 11 and 12, November 27; December 4

           So same case as last time. The reason why I am doing yet another 2 in 1 post is simple. On November 27, my mentor was on vacation and I had a family emergency. So, it was one of those days that everything just happened to occur. December 4th had a lot more happen though, at least in relation anyway. It started with me doing some more place estimates of a dock loading zone. This was done by using a combination of excal and Autodesk review. I got the volumes of various parts of the loading zone and then got how much it would cost with a base unit. And by that I mean that if I had 30 cubic meters of something, and that something cost 5 dollars per cubic meter than you would be paying 150 dollars. After that, I did some AutoCad work where I annotated stuff. Pretty simple day, but I learned more about some programs I use on a regular basis so it was fun. Thanks for reading.

Day 9 and 10, November 13;20, 2013

            Now you may be wondering on why I am doing one blog for two days. Well, that answer is that these 2 days were really quiet. On the 13 I came in to work for the first day, to my new set up in a new location. With my luck however, the setup didn't work and I had to wait a couple hours before I got some new equipment. In, the meantime I was tasked with calling several companies to get quotes for parts and building supplies. After that was done, I started my next task, which also took the entirety of the 20, archiving. There is a database of all the pump stations done at Langan on an excel spreadsheet. The only problem is that it is a little out dated. So, I was tasked with updating it which is quite the job since it was missing so much data. In fact even after 2 days of work, I am still not done with by job. This was also the reason why I combined two days for this blog. The archive took up most of my time on the 20.

Day 8, 11/6/2013

         So for this particular day, Mr. Koto came went up to me and offered to take me to an open house being held at a company called Allstate Powervac. And before you ask, it is not a company that offers insurance for vacuum cleaners. It is a company that deals in clean up and repair. I, of course, said yes so that I see more things. A car ride later, I was at the company open house where we were promptly offered free jackets. After which, we went on a tour. The facility wasn't very big but then again it doesn't need to be. Most of the room was used for repairing and cleaning vacuum trucks or parking them. But there was one interesting part. Follow one this. Lets say that you have a sewage pipe that is just destroyed and in terrible condition. This company has a way to fix it. They have a piece of felt that is covered in a certain type of chemical that when heated, will harden. So, they saturate the felt, drive it through the pipe, and heat it with steam and/or water. Once that starts it goes on until it is complete. And there you have a new pipe. Okay, it may not sound as interesting using words as a medium but seeing it was an experience. After that I went back to the office were I ate lunch and got some bad news. Well, bad new relative to an extremely minor problem. I was going to be located at a different desk for all my following weeks. Not a big problem, but hey, I liked that desk. I went to Mr. Raina after and was assigned to do some cost estimates. Then Ko gave me some AutoCad work. I was to count out all the parking spots for a mall parking lot using one of the Langan exclusive features. Then I used a program called AutoDrive. This program lets you "drive" an automobile on a CAD drawing to see if it can make all the turns. A useful tool when designing a mall parking lot. At this point, the day was over and I left.  
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Day 7, 10/30/13

             As usual, I got to work at 8:30 am and did so prep for the job until my mentors were able to get any work for me to do. My waiting did not take to long because at 9:00, Adam Kent comes up to me asks me to go over one of his field reports. Basically, he had some edits written with red pen on the paper and he asked me to write it in. The field report was about a fire flow test that he did on a site. And no, he was not lighting stuff on fire to see how fast the fire burned stuff. Basically, when you have a building about to be opened, you have to check to see if all the fire hydrants are up to snuff. That basically extends to knowing if the pressure in the pump is enough to work in a fire engine. To, check this you have to look at a number of features. First, you turn on a pump and test its water pressure. Then you go down the line and turn on another hydrant. This will allow you to collect a whole number of data points for the water main between the two pumps. First, if you have two pumps on, you will be able to see the pressure drop at the first pump. Then you can calculate numbers like the friction in the pipe, water flow, gallons of water per second in the pipe and so on. After going through this task, I went to another one of my mentors, Mr. Raina, to get another task. Here I learned about a job happening at Stormking high school. The school is on a hill so the waste water and rain water naturally goes down. But, the waste water has to get cleaned first. So, it gets chemically treated with chlorine and otherwise and then detoxified. Afterwards, it sent to one of two rivers. And, in order to keep track of how much water goes through the system, they have several sensors to measure the water flow every 15 minutes. Why 15 minutes? Eh, I was told that it is small enough that you can get a lot of data but not so small that it gets to a crazy amount of data. The problem is that somehow more water is getting into the system from rain water and is causing spikes in the charts. The place wants to see how much of a problem is to see whether or not it should be fixed. Thus, my company was hired to make an excel of how the rain has added to the system, and what the readings would be like without the rain. I can say that during this time, I learned more cool things about excel then I did before. Once, I was done with that, I went back to the pipe thing from last week to make sure everything was done. Afterwards, Adam went back to me with some more work. He had an AutoCad sketch that need to get edited. There were some measurements that had to be read and some charts that had to be added. Overall, it was pretty trivial. At that point, the day was over and I went home.

Day 6, 10/23/13

:           This day had me coming to work on 8:30 like usual and then working on my AutoCAD and what not as I waited for my mentors to come to work. Around 9 o'clock, Ko Hung Chan got to work at which point he assigned me some work. He had me do some hatch patterns on an AutoCAD in order to calculate the areas of a renovation that is going to happen. What? Maybe that might need some explanation.We will start at the beginning. A hatch pattern is useful for figuring out the dimensions of an object that standard formulas aren't useful for. For example, a formula will help you with a square but not that much with an irregular polygon. And while you could split up the shape into regular shapes, that is a lot more difficult that the hatch method. Hatch patterns also has the added benefits of nicely organizing and color-coding different sections of a drawing. The drawing of question was of a renovation where the owner wanted to renovate a shopping center. This is important because there are regulations for every town, of how different spaces should be allocated when doing things like that. Like you need to have 20% of the land covered by green stuff, or 40% of the land covered by crosswalks or parking space. That is were the hatch comes in. It will give you the area of the sketch and then you just do percent. I worked on this for a majority of the morning. The funny thing is that after my lunch, Ko walked up to me and said that he has to change the drawing because the client wanted to change some stuff. But, hey that is the trade. You do what the client wants. That is the trade. After that, I went to Mr. Raina to get more work to do. He told me that he wanted to make a database of pipe sizes. Why? Well, lets say that you have a work site, but it is under sea level. How do you get waste from the lower part of the ground to the higher ground. The answer is that you use a pumping station. A pumping station is usually made up of a pump and some pipe to transport the waste. The trouble comes when one has to decide what pipes to use. This task is two fold. The first one is that you have to pick the size of the pipe you want. If one thinks of the formula pressure=force divided by area you can figure out why. When water moves through a pipe, there is actually friction. Not against the water but against the sides of the pipe. So, the larger the pipe, the more force you need. The second thing that one has to decide is what types of pipes on uses. There are three types of pipe materials.These materials are PVC, ductile iron and polyethylene. The differences between these is mostly what you would expect. Two of them are a type of plastic pipe, the iron piping needs a membrane on the inside in order to protect against corrosion, and different pipes can take different amount of pressure. So, I had to make an excel making a table cataloging the inner diameter, outer diameter and thickness of each pipe in order to assist my boss. I also had to make 2 for each since people use both metric and US imperial in the US. Something interesting I learned here is the decision that was made regarding the sizes. The sizes between metric and and US imperial do not actually match up. The reason being is that if you take almost any US size and try to turn it in metric, you get all sort of fractions and decimals. Engineers decided that instead of doing that, they would just arbitrarily choose whole numbers in metric that are similar to the US size. By the way, the data was received online from various websites and databases. Making the tables pretty much took the rest of my day. That was my adventure at my internship for the 23rd of October. Thanks for reading.

Day 5, 10/16/2013; Sorry

          Sorry, Oh humble readers of mine, but I have nothing to write about today. Reason? Well, I caught the flu earlier in the week and I needed some time to recover. As such, I didn't go to Langan this week. But rest assured, for even if the morrow is barren of promises, nothing shall forestall my return. I will have some stuff to talk about next week. Thanks for understanding.

Day 4; 10/9/13

  This day had me doing the least to date. The reason for this, almost all my mentors, save 2, were out of the office for one reason of another. The first task I had to do, I am not even sure if I am allowed to talk about since it is about legal action. The task after that was for me to draft a couple sketches and look at a couple field reports. This day only had me doing real work for about 6 hours. Sorry readers for the extremely short post, but I really didn't do anything today.

Day 3; 10/2/13

         The third day was by far the most interesting so far. Mr. Koto came by and told me that he wanted me to see more of the job then what desk jockeys see. By the way, the is not the exact thing that he said. The first area I was taken to was a site in Montclair to see how excavation is going. After that we looked at a ground water cleaning station by a shop rite. Can't much about the actual project since it is company information but I picked up interesting information to and form the areas. The first thing I learned is why one always see stores of a similar bland near each other. Examples would be why there are always multiple car dealer ships, banks, or corner shops near each other. Basically once a certain store gets a contract to a town they will then get set up. But then, another company will go to the town and say that it isn't fair to the people if they only have one store to buy stuff for and that is limited competition. This leads to other stores building up near the first one. It turns out that to a company, hurting another companies profits is more important than boosting your own. I also learned that stores don't like owning land. So, all those malls that you see aren't owned my the stores that are on top of them. They are only leased for 99 years. After driving with Mr. Koto, I got back to the office in time for lunch. After lunch, Mr. Raina came up to me with another task. He has another project in a town called Hawthorne. However, the person who is building is making a combination type of building that can qualify as residential and industrial. As a result, Mr, Raina needed me to go through Hawthorn rules in order to make a zoning table. A zoning table basically describes the rules and constraints one much follow if they are to make a building. These rules change from town to town and they change for various building purpose. That took me until the end of the day. The entire day took around 8 hours. Please note that I am going to spot saying the total amount of ours per day since most days are around 8 hours.

Day 2; 9/25/13

        My second day stated out a lot more calm than first one. I got to the office almost half an hour earlier so I was able to have breakfast and prepping for my day. Said prep involved me practicing some AutoCAD. After an hour of prep, Mr. Raina came and told me to look through the files that I looked through in the previous week. I learned more about he project here. It turns out that the place in the area used to be an Aldi market which is being changed into a new shopping center. This is all happening in Linden, New Jersey. And in order to assist in any renovations, it would help to have some select files scanned into the computer system for easy retrieval. And here was my job. I was to look through all the files and find the most recent files that also happened to be useful. As a result of the large amount of files, it took 4 hours. After, organizing the files, I was to take it to be scanned by the company scanner and organize it on the computer. That took the rest of the day. All in all it was a pretty monotonous and boring day with about 8 hours of work to it.

Day 1; 09/18/13

              I was fairly nervous on my first day on my internship. I had never really done anything like it before, so I was a little jumpy. What made that feeling worse was that on the way to the building, there was some pretty bad traffic which allowed me to stew on my emotions for a little bit. I finally get to the building at around 8:30 and proceed to my internship. My internship started with an orientation with a person named Wendy Rosenoff or something like that. During my orientation, I learned about how the staff at Langan works, hours, how to navigate the office, and several snippets of information like the password onto the floor, or how to contact the text department. I was also introduced to my mentor and all pseudo-mentors, for lack of a better term. You see that my official mentor is the head of site/civil engineering, Gerard Fitamant. However seeing as he is the head of a fairly large department I have report to a lot of engineers under Gerard. Basically, I am an intern for the entire civil engineering department. That entire process takes around 2 hours. My "assistant" mentors are people called Ko Hung Chan, Rajeev Raina, Mr. Koto, Adam Kent and anyone else who needs some grunt work done. After the orientation I am sent to Mr. Raina who proceeds to give me a 10 minute information session on his job and what he does. He then tells me that he is working on a project and he needs some files that were done many years in the past in order to assist in his project. I was sent to look at several filing books and order all the relevant files in a way that was easy to access. This event taught me that if you want to be an engineer, then you better be ready for lots and lots of AutoCAD drawings. This took more or less an hour worth of time. I went to have lunch in the cafe located in the basement where I got a chicken cutlet sandwich. Afterwards, Mr. Chan gave me some drawings to practice my CAD abilities on. The papers were from his job on the Montclair University Renovations. That went to the end of the day. All in all, it was a decent first day with about 8 hours of time spent at the office.

Introduction-How it began

     Hi. My name is Conrad Kieras and this is my blog. In this blog, I will be describing my adventures as a high school intern. The company I decided to lend my services to is known as Langan Engineering. Langan was first founded as a geotechnical specialty firm in 1970. Eventually it grew into what it is now, which is to say a firm made up of geotechnical, environmental and civil engineers. I first learned about Langan via the science day of my school. Science day being, by the way, a day where a lot of professionals from many different careers come to Hackensack Academy in Bergen, New Jersey in order to talk to students about their respective skills. It is here were I met a man named Don Koto. We had an interesting conversation about how bigger ships going through the Panama Canal have to do with port construction in New York. After our meeting, I inquired about an internship, to which he gave me a business card and told me to try. The funny thing was that Mr. Koto is the unofficial head of interns, something that he told me a couple weeks later. After sending in my application I was asked about an interview which was both over the phone and face to face. The phone interview was asking about my skills and abilities while the face to face interview was more about if you are capable to normal human behavior (at least I think so). Well after that, I got accepted and so begins the story of my internship.