by PlannerAdmin
As planners, our backgrounds, skills, and areas of interest are wide-ranging, from affordable housing finance to transportation infrastructure to environmental analysis. We work across private, public, and non-profit sectors, and often at their intersection. Our peers are watching and acting on some of the most important emerging questions in our world today: how to make sense of Big Data, how to prepare our cities for future growth, and how to preserve the past in a quickly changing world. As a reminder of the diverse opportunities of planning work, and to get to know our classmates a little better, here is short sampling of how some of our fellow MUPpets spent their summers. We hope their stories will provide some lessons learned and inspiration, and a glimpse for new students into the broad possibilities of the planning world.
Big Data, Sustainability, & Equity: Hannah Kates (Uber)
This summer I interned at Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco. I worked as part of the Policy Research team, which is responsible for trying to quantify Uber’s impact on cities and their economies. They primarily pull together statistics and create maps using their data to demonstrate impacts like the scope of Uber’s service coverage and in which neighborhoods they are helping create the most jobs.
The sole focus of my internship was a research project examining Uber’s impact on parking in cities. This involved looking at both Uber driver parking and the projected parking of riders if they hadn’t used Uber. My goal was to develop and pilot a methodology for the analysis. I used tools like QGIS, SQL, R, and Python to analyze driver GPS logs and figure out when drivers are parked. I also got experience with survey design when I conducted pilot survey campaigns of recent riders to ask about their most recent trip and if they would have driven their own car if they hadn’t used Uber.
Working at Uber was a wonderful learning opportunity, and it was fascinating to get perspective from the side of a startup that clearly has a big influence in cities. It was also fun to get out of NYC for the summer and get exposure to some of San Francisco’s urban planning challenges, like housing affordability, homelessness, and fragmented public transit options. After I finish at Wagner and the Center for Science and Urban Progress (CUSP), I want to work on using data to help cities operate more sustainably and equitably. I’m leaning toward jobs in the public sector but also open to non-profits and startups.
Building Technical Skills: Max Meltzer (Philip Habib and Associates)
This summer I had the pleasure of working for Philip Habib and Associates, a planning and engineering consulting firm in Manhattan. The firm specializes in the preparation of Environmental Assessment Statements and Environmental Impact Statements for both private and public clients working on large and small scale development or redevelopment projects in all five boroughs of New York City.
With Philip Habib and Associates, I have had a unique opportunity to work on a variety of projects throughout the city of varying sizes and scales and with private developers, city agencies, and local development corporations. I have learned a tremendous amount about the development process in New York, gotten to see first hand the processes involved in the lengthy environmental review, and have gotten to work on EAS and EIS statements in various ways including the drafting of sections of different chapters following CEQR standards. In addition, I had the opportunity to conduct appropriate fieldwork to supplement these statements, and have vastly improved my technical skills as I use ArcGIS and Adobe Illustrator everyday!
This experience will no doubt help me after Wagner. Wherever I may end up following my tenure at Wagner, the experience of working for a private consulting firm is a tremendous experience to have. It was something my resume lacked and I am glad I am able to broaden my background through this on-going experience (I still work at Philip Habib). I have greatly increased my portfolio, strengthened my skillset, and improved my marketability because of this experience with the firm given the wide-array of projects I worked on, skills I developed and improved, the pace at which I worked delivering for clients, and the overall, general experience I gained.
Getting Outside the World of Research: Alice Anigacz (Clinton Foundation)
I traded the chance to learn more about affordable housing in New York City—my rasion d’etre—for the opportunity to meet former President Bill Clinton. And I’d do it again. As the Operations Intern at the Clinton Foundation, I spent my summer helping the Foundation assess and document its technology needs. I spoke with various initiatives at the Foundation about their communications and technology needs, created process flows and infographics, and got to meet some truly impressive individuals—not just the man himself, but also well-traveled staff, guest speakers doing impactful work to improve lives in the US and abroad, and a truly crème-de-la-crème group of fellow interns.
Beyond rubbing shoulders with these stellar individuals and shaking hands with President Clinton, the summer was an opportunity for me to move outside of the world of research. With a background in public policy research and a year at the Furman Center under my belt, it was time for me to take advantage of my time in graduate school to move beyond the familiar, and I recommend everyone do the same. As someone who had only ever worked in research, I was curious about how things actually get done (if only to better understand how to evaluate them).
While I had vague notions of how foundations operate prior to my time at the Clinton Foundation, I now have a better understanding of how much work it truly requires to raise funds (and commitments to action), and the amount of event planning and relationship management involved in fundraising (Hint: it’s a lot). It was one step closer to doing and I’ll be getting another step closer this academic year as a Fellow at the West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing.
Remembering the Past: Sam Levy (San Francisco Planning Department)
Over the summer, I worked as an intern for the Historic Preservation team at the San Francisco Planning Department. My main goal for the summer was to evaluate, redesign, and update their historic resources database and the way in which that information was displayed to the public. Essentially, the majority of my job boiled down to data management. While I think we can all agree that data management is probably one of the least sexy things ever, it is extremely important. Unfortunately, the Historic Preservation is too small to have the internal expertise to really maintain their database, so they rely on staff in the City Planning Department’s general IT team, who have broad responsibilities and do not necessarily have a historic preservation background. This disconnect between the people evaluating historic resources and the people updating the database led to a lot of gaps in their knowledge. Given the fact that San Francisco has plans for a citywide historic resources survey in the works, it became even more important that the department know what it had already done in terms of historic designations.
As a result of my work over the summer, about 6,500 properties were reclassified and now receive a higher level of scrutiny in project review (affecting, in some way, about 300 open projects). These were not properties that were surveyed over the course of the summer or the year preceding and just hadn’t made it into the database yet. They were properties that had fallen through the cracks and had been misclassified, in many cases, for years. What impressed me about this was the speed at which I saw the direct impact of the work that I had done. Mostly, this surprised me because of my preconceived notions of city government slowly drifting through a sea of bureaucratic molasses. I expected a lot of time to pass before my work would see the light of day, but instead they switched on all of my work for their legacy database about halfway through the program.
While at the Planning Department, I was also afforded the opportunity of getting outside the bubble of my project. I attended project pre-application meetings, site visits, general staff meetings as well as other informational sessions designed to help everyone in the internship program understand the way in which the department functions, managed my own intern (a fun little surprise), and towards the end of the program I was even in charge of two project reviews (a genuinely overwhelming task given the sheer volume and ever-changing nature of the codes in San Francisco). Overall, this internship was a great experience that helped me make connections, reminded me of the importance of data management, and made me feel that the contribution that I was making was a valuable one (something that is too frequently lost in internships and work generally).