Post 2

I love my internship! Here are some of the reasons why:

1. My boss is amazing. I really appreciate that she speaks English with me even though I should really be trying to use my Italian. She does a spectacular job of explaining things to me, she is always bright and cheery, and she speaks her mind. Despite the language barrier, I feel like we have a very good system going, in which she explains the project and its goals to me and tells me what I should work on, I go come up with something and show her, and she gives me comments to improve it. So far, this has worked very well. If I have questions, she is very responsive.

2. My colleagues are great. Of course, I wish I could understand better what they're saying, but they are still very welcoming and friendly to me. Two of the girls are especially nice to me: Maria Rita and Elena. They take me out to lunch with them every day and try to speak with me, even though they don't know much English and my Italian is embarrassing. Maria Rita and I have gone out to Aperitivo twice in the evenings so that I can work on my Italian and she can work on her English. It's been super fun. This week, we are hoping to go to "Birdman" dubbed in Italian with English subtitles together. I'm super excited. Hopefully, all this exposure will eventually sink in. I already feel like my ability to understand is improving.

3. The project I am working on is great. We are redesigning the a section of the Flaminio neighborhood to contain a City of Science, regular and social housing, commercial space, and a hotel. It is right across the street from the Maxxi Museum by Zaha Hadid, which is a spectacular structure, but it lacks connection to the rest of the city. One of the main problems with the site is that there are so many barriers everywhere. The main road is literally just a sea of cars, which makes it difficult for pedestrians to get across. We are proposing to push the parking underground to make way for pedestrians and to open up the space so that is it welcoming to pedestrians and makes connections with surroundings streets, other parks in the area, other roads, and other monuments. Two weeks ago, I made an updated plan of the site and then 3D modeled it in Rhino. Then, I made a series of 9 different options as to how all the programs could be designed and arranged. Last week, we had a meeting with Tom Rankin who is an architecture professor at University of Iowa, and he helped us give the project a little more direction and choose which schema we wanted to go with. Now, the process is simply putting our submission boards together to depict what our project entails and why it's great. Federica, Tom, and Paolo were extremely welcoming during this process. They really made me feel valued. Not only did they end up choosing one of my designs for the submission, but they invited me to the planning meeting and really seemed interested in my input. When I imagined my first internship, I never dreamed of feeling this accepted and valued as a designer. I really don't think I could have asked for anything better.

The only problem this week is that the submission for this competition is due the same day as my competition submission for my architecture studio through Accent, which means I have double duty all week! It's going to be a lot of sleepless nights, but I think it will be worth it.