Clemson University
Department of Construction Science Management
Internship Portfolio of Carson Porcher
SAMET CORPORATION
Internship
Experience No. 2
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Charleston Branch Head Executive
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Bob Austin
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Direct: (843)714-2795
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Cell: (336)482-8435
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Company Information
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Samet Corporation; Charleston Branch
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2457 Aviation Avenue Suite 122
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North Charleston, SC 29406
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(843)714-2795
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Contact Information
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Carson Porcher
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1550 Terns Nest Road Charleston, SC 29412
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(843) 814-7618
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Foundational
Information:
Samet Corporation is a construction and real estate development company that performs work in the commercial/industrial, educational, healthcare, and housing industries while striving for excellence in service, quality, innovation, trust, and safety. There are four different areas of operation within the company located in Greensboro, Charlotte, and Raleigh, NC and Charleston, SC. There are over 140 employees for Samet spread across the four different branch locations. I had the pleasure of working for the Charleston branch which is the newest branch within the company and only has less than 10 full time employees currently.
Company Overview
Week 1: May 15 - May 19
Total Hours Worked: 44
I began my internship with Samet Corporation this week along with another intern from Clemson University. On my first day I went through my onboarding process with the company, during which I was trained in using Prolog Manager and BambooHR, educated on Samet's safety program and procedures, and visited the site in which I will be working the remainder of the summer at. The job I have been placed at for the summer is a multi-family apartment complex renovation in which my company is the GC, we are performing repairs to the exterior framing of the building, re-shingling roofs and reapplying stucco to the exterior. In the later part of the week, I observed and documented a window water test on a couple of windows that had just been set to check for any leaks or installation error.
Weekly Reports
Week 2: May 22 - May 26
Total Hours Worked: 40
This week I spent most of my time documenting progress photos of framing and sheathing repairs, I also walked a few inspections for framing/insulation, sheathing, and anchor bolt tie downs on Building 200 of the complex. I also documented our temporary labor time tickets in Prolog, making sure all of them had the correct cost codes amount of hours worked.
Week 3: May 30 - June 2
Total Hours Worked: 32
The week I had Memorial Day off so it was a short week. Through walking through all of the units in a few buildings, I came to find a few A/C units that were not working and a few of these units were growing mold. After discussing this my superintendent had me develop a mitigation program that we will go through all of the buildings weekly to find any issues that need immediate attention. The spreadsheet I came up with will have the person performing the mitigation walk-through going in each unit and checking for few different things such as: leaks, water intrusions, broken A/C units, functional dehumidifiers, locked windows/door, open fridges, etc. We need to do this to ensure that we keep the units in the best shape possible throughout the renovation and repairs of the complex. I performed a beta test for the mitigation program to see how many buildings can be walked-through in a day and will begin training a laborer to perform the walkthroughs on a daily basis next week.
Week 4: June 5 - June 9
Total Hours Worked: 40
This week I spent the week training a laborer to perform a walkthrough for the mitigation program and following up on any issues he came across. I also walked a couple framing/insulation and sheathing inspections on a couple buildings. I also had to document laborer time tickets and mitigation program spreadsheets in prolog.
Week 5: June 12 - June 16
Total Hours Worked: 40
This week I managed and monitored the mitigation program on the site, documented inspections in prolog, took progress photos of the site, and documented laborer time tickets in Prolog throughout the week.
Week 6: June 19 - June 23
Total Hours Worked: 40
This week we were preparing to get our first Certificate of Occupancy in one of the ten buildings on our site. We had to get our final MEP inspection in order to do get the CO, so I spent the week creating an MEP punchlist for the building and following up to ensure that the punchlists was getting completed. There are still a few items left on the punchlist to complete before the MEP inspection next week, but for the most part we have the building ready for inspection.
Week 7: June 26 - June 30
Total Hours Worked: 40
This week I continued to managed and monitor the mitigation program I put in place a few weeks ago. I also finished punching out building 500 which got its Final MEP Inspection and CO this week. Now the only task left to do in the building is mold bomb the units to cleanse the air of any impurities and then have the air quality tested.
Week 8: July 5 - July 7
Total Hours Worked: 24
This week I managed and monitored the mitigation program in all buildings on site, documented framing/insulation, sheathing, and anchor bolt inspections by the third party inspectors, and documented progress photos of windows that had been recently set and waterproofed.
Week 9: July 10 - July 14
Total Hours Worked: 40
This week I managed and monitored the mitigation program in all buildings on site. The rest of my time was spent managing general laborers pulling plastic off of wooden floors and clearing demoed trim and drywall debris out of units. This was a tedious task, the laborers were not the most motivated workers so I had to stay on them all week to get anything done.
Week 10: July 17- July 21
Total Hours Worked: 40
I spent the first half of this in the field where I managed and monitored the mitigation program and documented few framing/insulation shear wall inspections. During the second half of the week, I was in the office working with the preconstruction team to gather quotes from subcontractors for a job we are bidding in the next couple weeks. Our main focus on the calls was to make sure the companies received our invitations to bid and then see if they were interested in sending us a quote for their respective fields.
Week 11: July 24 - July 28
Total Hours Worked: 40
This week I started out in the office making a few more phone calls to subs and narrowing down what subs were going to send in quotes and reached out to the certain divisions we were light on for the Scout Boats Manufacturing Plant job we are going to bid. During the second half of the week I was back on site where I caught up with any issues that came up with the mitigation program while I was gone. While in the field I also conducted bombed building 500 with mold bombs to purify the air before the units get air tested and cleared for tenants to move in.
Week 12: July 31 - August 4
Total Hours Worked: 21
I was back on site this week and spent the majority of my time managing temporary laborers on things such as: peeling plastic, general cleanup, material relocation, etc. At the end of the week, I was in the office helping the precon team gather information for a bid we have due on August 8th. I was assigned 4 divisions to call subs making sure they had all the information needed to submit their quotes before bid time and too also make sure we had enough quotes coming for each of those divisions to make it competitive.
Week 13: August 7 - August 11
Total Hours Worked: 46
This week I spent the first two days in the office helping prepare our bid package for the Scout Boats Manufacturing Plant. Once we submitted the bid I went back out in the field for the remainder of the week where I documented a few inspections, and performed an anchor bolt review on five buildings where I located areas where anchor bolts were required but were missing. Once I located all of these areas, I made some floor plan layouts with the target areas highlighted so we could easily relocate them when they were getting drilling and set in place. I also spent the later part of the week completing our as-built set of drawings by putting all of the RFI's in them on the respective pages that they correlated with.
Week 14: August 14 - August 18
Total Hours Worked: 40
Last week the laborer we had working on the mitigation program for me stopped showing up for work, as a result of this I spent the first couple days training a new laborer how to perform the mitigation walks and document them properly. After I trained her, I followed up on her reports daily to assure she was doing everything correctly and that she could handle the responsibility. The rest of the week I spent x-raying the areas where we had to put anchor bolts, we did this to assure that there were no wire, rebar, etc. in the places we were drilling.
End of Internship Report
A. General Information
Start Date: May 15
End Date: Aug 18
Total Hours Worked: 527 Hours
For the summer of 2017 I worked as a construction intern for Samet Corporation at their Charleston, SC branch. I worked at a multifamily apartment complex that Samet was renovating assisting the superintendents and project manager with daily tasks, documentation and labor management. I also worked a couple weeks with Samet's pre-construction team in the Charleston office, helping them contact subcontractors, gather and analyze sub quotes, and create bid package for a couple of job Samet was bidding.
B. Relationship of Work Experience to CSM Curriculum
Working as a construction intern over the summer gave me the opportunity to familiarize myself with many of the things that were covered in CSM 2030 and 2050, Materials and Methods in Construction I and II. Being on a site with different buildings on various stages of renovation exposed me to a broad spectrum of project stages and gave me the opportunity to see first hand a lot of different tasks that I learned about in these two classes.
I also applied the knowledge I gained from taking CSM 2040 and 2041 while working for Samet this summer. There were many occassions where I had to read plans and be familiar with the terminology being used in the plans and on the jobsite to perform the tasks I was assigned to do. There were a couple cases where I would have trouble interpreting drawings but once explained to me by a superior I caught on quickly.
The time I spent working with the preconstruction team, I used a lot of the knowledge I learned in Construction Estimating 1 & 2 in conversing with subcontractors, analyzing quotes/scope of work, and assisting to put together the bid package.
C. Problem and Solution:
Step 1: What are the signals that a problem exists?
Broken windows in unit used for material and tool storage, stolen materials and tools
Step 2: Determine what you know or assume you know about the problem situation.
What is the difference between the way things are and the way you want them to be?
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the unit the materials and tools were stored in was tool easily broken into, we wanted the unit to be more secure
Where is the difference observed? When does the difference occur? When is it visible? When is it observed?
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In the unit with Samet's materials and various hand tools and handheld equipment.
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Occurred during the night over the weekend
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Was noticed the following Monday morning when the Superintendent arrived on site at 6:00 a.m.
Who is involved?
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thief
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superintendent
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police
To what extent: How many? How far? How much? How long?
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about $400 worth of tools and materials were stolen
Step 3: Interpret what you know or assume you know
Facts: tools and materials were stolen from one of our units in which we store materials
Assumptions: May have been an inside job, how did the thief know we kept our tools and materials in the unit, which is one of 275 unit on the site.
Expression of Frustration: tools and equipment had to be replaced immediately, night watchmen did notice or catch the culprit when we were paying them to notify police when events of this sort occur.
Step 4: State the problem.
$400 worth of equipment and materials stolen, how can we better secure the units with stored materials and equipment to
avoid this happening again.
Step 5: State the objectives that will eliminate the problem.
Secure the units in which materials and tools are stored in way that would make it difficult enough to break in so in the event of a break in, it would slow down the perp long enough for the night security guards to notice them breaking in.
Step 6: Develop alternative solutions - keep in mind that below are only some of the possible alternate solutions
Alternate 1: install security cameras around the building in which the materials and tools are stored.
Alternate 2: boost the amount of security on site at night and make sure the watchmen are patrolling the site regularly throughout the night
Step 7: Sequence in order of first, second, etc., and evaluate each of the alternative solutions
Number 1: Alt 1 would be the most effective alternate solution because the cameras would be more reliable than the night watchmen and a one time lump-sum cost to install them
Number 2: Alt 2 would be the least effective alternate because the nightwatchmen were on site when the initial break-in occurred and did not even notice the break in. Adding more night watchmen does not guarantee they will work the way they are expected to unsupervised
Step 8: Develop the action plan to implement the best solution(s).
The plan we went with was the original plan which was to secure the windows in a way that someone would have to exert a lot of time and effort in order to break in. This would act as a deterrent for a burglar to attempt breaking in and it would also allow more time for the night watchmen to catch them in the act of breaking in and contact the police.
Step 9: Follow-Up
The action plan we implemented seemed to be effective. For the next month or so I was on site, there were no more attempts to break in and nothing was stolen.
D. Ethical Situation
The only ethical situation I encountered this summer was during my time in the office working with the lead estimator on a bid package. While I was making calls to companies within my specified divisions, I had a man from a company in North Carolina return my call and explain to me that he would not be bidding the job with my company because he has bid jobs with our Greensboro office for 6 years and has never got any work out of it. He further explained that he felt we were shopping his bids just to check the numbers of other subs quoting the job and never had the intentions of using his company for the scope of work they were bidding.
Three possible positions I could have taken to the subcontactor claiming we were shopping his bids are as follows:
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Since the work the company was bidding was hard bid work, the man's company could have just not been competitive with other subcontractors quoting within their scope. This would mean that my company had not been unethical in their sub selection process. I would not further pursue making things right with this subcontractor because he was making false accusations and ethically I would not want to work with a company that operates in such a way.
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If my company had been unethical and overlooked the sub's company in the past even when they had the low bid, then I could have spoken with manager's at my branch in Charleston and see if they had desire to contact the subcontractor and explain that we were a different branch within our company and that we did not practice unethical behavior throughout our bid selection process. This could potentially create a positive relationship out of what was a negative one, which in turn would help the reputation of the Charleston branch of my company.
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I could have done nothing about the situation and ignored the issue considering the subcontractor was located in a different state and we had plenty of quotes from other companies in the same scope of work. The consequences of this would have been that subcontractor continuing to think badly of my company and potentially smearing our reputation to other contractors and subcontractors within his area. This would have for certain been the worst stance I could have taken on the situation which is why I did not.