Intern at Fuss & O’Neill

I had the opportunity to work for Fuss & O’Neill, a multi-disciplined engineering consulting firm based out of Manchester, Connecticut. Fuss and O’Neill is a small company, with about 250 total employees, that specializes mainly in environmental engineering and infrastructure but also does work in construction, energy, facility, and manufacturing. I was fortunate to earn an internship position in the Columbia, South Carolina office, which focuses on environmental engineering projects.

The second smallest of six offices located up and down the east coast, and one in California, I worked in a close-knit environment with professional engineers, project managers, engineers in training, and even a landscape architect. My workday would change on a day-to-day basis, allowing me to gain experience in a wide variety of projects and real world

situations. Some examples of the tasks I had the chance to work on are field work, including site walk-throughs and evaluations; soil sampling, and well monitoring; assisting in building a database in Microsoft Access of chemicals used by our clients that could be potentially hazardous if released into the environment in quantities that exceed the limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); researching and comparing field equipment standards set not only by the EPA but also the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) with company practices; research old air quality projects conducted by Fuss and O’Neill; building potentiometric maps to determine groundwater flow direction; and assisting in compiling a Phase I environmental assessment report for a large land purchasing deal. A few of the many skills I learned and improved on during my 10-week experience include: working with Microsoft Access, a large data base building tool used to generate forms, reports, and queries; AutoCAD and AutoCAD Civil 3D, two tools used heavily in the civil engineering field; and ArcGIS, a powerful mapping program that provides the user with information related to flood areas, topographic maps, and the locations of utilities.

Fuss and O’Neill is a great company for any civil engineering student to work at in order to gain real world experience in a friendly environment. The company takes care of its interns. There were multiple people outside of the Columbia office that I knew I could reach out to if any problem arose. I even got a chance to meet and have a personal conversation with the CEO when he came down to give a quarterly update of the company, which is not something I would expect to do as an intern. Coming into this internship I was uncertain about how I wanted to use my civil engineering degree, but after ten weeks I feel as though Fuss & O’Neill has given me a sense of direction and an understanding of the available career opportunities.