The last job i had aside from the role that I’ve been in with Bo&Vine every school year (excluding summers), was a job in the construction field working for a general contractor in Plymouth Massachusetts. While it wasn’t my initial first choice to go to New England for the summer, I knew I wanted to gain some experience in this field because it had always seemed somewhat attractive to me to understand how things are built, then build them. At the spring OSU College of Business career fair, I talked with multiple construction companies about a potential summer internship in project management, but had no luck. The job descriptions were all pretty similar but each one requested some sort of construction experience as well (and at the time I had none). While this was slightly discouraging, i figured out what I needed to do pretty quickly based on those conversations; get experience. My uncle on the east coast who does General Contractor work put me in touch with another General Contractor in the area and explained my situation to him. He was happy to take me onboard to help me earn some industry experience. My direct job experience had nothing to do with the construction industry, and the closest thing that came to it was landscaping. However, through both a landscaping job and working in a warehouse over the summers of my freshman and sophomore years of college, I understood what it meant and how it felt to work manual labor positions and sort of knew what to expect. Technically the job I had over the summer with the general contractor didn’t have a job description, so my informal title was “Laborer,” and was able to learn many valuable skills in just the 10 weeks I was there. One thing I also realized was that the construction industry was probably not for me. I loved the manual labor portion, I loved doing residential work, I loved learning the tools and how to use them, but I didn’t see enough long term growth through that specific facet of business unless I went off on my own as a general Contractor to start my own business. All in all, it was a good summer experience to help me learn more about the industry but also to help me rule it out as a field of interest in the future. Could definitely see myself doing projects for fun in a workshop when I’m older however.
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