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By Richard Bermack
Contributing Writer and Photographer
Last year, a Project Labor Agreement with contractors renovating San Francisco schools created a program to introduce high school students to the building trades by placing student interns at job sites. The program was so popular that this year, the number of placements more than doubled.
Last year, 12 students from the San Francisco Unified School District participated in the program; this year 32 did.
Gus Amador, the program’s instructor, was excited not only about the increased numbers, but also about the improved quality of the placements. “We all learned from last year, and this year the employers provided a learning experience with a lot more substance,” Amador explained. Last year the placements were mainly at school sites; this year they were all over the city.
For example, an intern placed at Webcor Builders’ sustainability division was introduced to green building projects and the LEED system for rating and evaluating projects for their environmental sustainability. Another intern was placed at the Trans-Bay Terminal.
Next year Amador hopes to improve the program further. His only concern is that the program not get too big too fast. “I want to stress quality over quantity,” he said.
On the Job Site visited interns at the Aptos Middle School, on a project by McCarthy Builders Inc., at the offices of Eternal General Contractors and at the offices of Webcor Builders.
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 Swaroop Mohanlal
Project Engineer, McCarthy Builders
It is always good to teach the youth something new and give them exposure to construction as an occupation they can take up. At McCarthy, we put a lot of emphasis on training and building things correctly. Getting high school students interested in construction is something we value. They are at a formative age, and for them to get an introduction to the building trades and for them to see what are good building practices and what are not, is very important to us. These are very smart young kids. It’s a rewarding experience taking them around, teaching them the ropes and showing them how work is done. In today’s age of technology, everybody wants to be a computer science student, but even computer scientists need good buildings to work in. And we build good buildings. We want the youth to realize the opportunity the construction industry has to offer: the rewards of building something right and the opportunity for them to make a living doing it. There’s a lot of money in construction.
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 Zsolt Anderson
Intern at Eternal Contractors
The best part is learning how the business works, and all the different personalities, including the hierarchy between architects, contractors and subcontractors. They all do different things, but the architects are higher up. I’m getting information ready, going through papers and making labels for folders. They have a few dump trucks, and one of them broke down, so I’m helping them find out how to donate it to a charity. I like learning how things work and building stuff. At school we built a project using a mouse-trap to set off a chain reaction. On another project, we made a boat with tinfoil and rubber bands. I’m not sure what I want to do after I graduate. I’m not ruling out being a construction worker or engineer, I just haven’t figured it out yet. I like this workplace because the people aren’t as stressed out as they are at a bigger workplace.
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 Jonathan Lowe
Intern at Webcor Sustainable
I’m making binders for the project they’ve done and learning to use the LEED rating system. It’s very interesting, all the different ways to show a building is green. I never realized how different types of glass can change the temperature inside a building or that different types of concrete have different green ratings. Some are more environmentally friendly, like those using fly ash. Another interesting material is quiet rock, which is a drywall product that can reduce noise and is used for sound insulation. I like working with mechanical concepts and am interested in architecture and engineering. I’m not generally good at drawing, but I took an architecture class two years ago and found that I like drawing buildings and designing stuff. I found that very interesting.
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 Gus Amador
Instructor
We try to give the interns a realistic glimpse of working life in the construction industry, so that they can take it all in and make the right decisions for their future. The program is not about a summer job, it’s about exposure to the building trades as a career. Even if they don’t continue in the trades, they will at least have this positive memory and respect for the profession and the people in it. Not all our students are from the Academy of Engineering; some are from Information Technology or from Finance. And they really benefit. I hear them say, “I had no idea construction would be like this. I really liked it.” Good, bad or indifferent, the internship program really gets them thinking. I can only see the program getting better every year.
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 Lewis Lin Xiao
Intern at Aptos Middle School, McCarthy Builders
I’m studying architecture and design. Now that I’m on the site, I get to look around and see how they do everything. I get to see how they pour cement, how they lay tiles and how they do resilient floors. It’s amazing. They have me organizing documents and files. There is a lot of vocabulary I need to look up, so I’m learning a lot of professional terms. I like correcting other people’s mistakes. The best part is when I get to use the computer and to print out the documents and put them in files and big binders.
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Student Journals
Instructor Gus Amador had the students write journals each week reflecting on what they learned working at their job sites. Here are some of the students’ answers:
Kristen
What did you learn this week?
This week I learned how to organize submittals into binders and make copies so that the big boss could have a set as well. I also learned there are many subcontractors during the project. If someone gets hurt or injured, it is a very long process that everyone has to go through in order to avoid legal issues.
What challenges and successes did you face?
The challenge that I faced was being able to stay focused, because at the end of the day I started to lose a lot of energy. I sometimes get tired of doing certain tasks for seven hours. I have learned to stay more focused and be more patient with my work.
Branden
What did you learn this week?
I learned to manage a database for sewer inspection. I learned to look at sewer mapping and the geometric length of the pipe. I learned to use a program called Flexidata 6. I also continued to do sewer inspection videos.
What challenges and successes did you face?
I had to work more on the computer, but was able to ask a lot of questions and learn to properly run programs on the computer to my advantage.
Wei
What did you learn this week?
The third week at the DPW bureau of construction management, I learned how to make a daily schedule for those workers who are working at the Palace of Fine Arts project. At first when I came to this construction site, I didn’t have any idea about construction and engineering, even though my father was a contractor. After I had been at this site a few weeks, I learned how things got built and how they solved the problems for the projects.
What challenges and successes did you face?
The challenge I faced this week is whether I should tell my supervisor I made a mistake on the daily schedule. At last I told him, and he said it was easy to change the mistake. The success was that I learned how to do a daily schedule online.
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On the Jobsite 
