On Wednesday it was take your kid to work day. So of course I was brought to my dad’s work.

My dad is an architect who has done countless projects like the Nordstrom building downtown, Woodgrove Mall in Nanaimo and pacific center food court.

On Wednesday we went on a site review at Woodgrove Mall in Nanaimo. We woke up at 5:00 AM to catch the earliest ferry over, I did not enjoy that part. On the ferry we got breakfast and met one of the people working on my dad’s project, Rob. Rob is a mechanical engineer who was also coming over for the site review.

When we arrived at Woodgrove we met up with Claude, Sean and Rick who are all on the general contractors team for the project.

Here are some pictures I took of some of the developments that are going on at Woodgrove.

After the site review we went to a meeting room at the mall where a review meeting was held with everyone that was on the site review and the clients. This meetings purpose was pretty much going over what problems have arisen and also just recapping the timeline and making sure everything will get done on time. One problem that my dad’s team has been having is the electricity boxes that go into the floor, the lids on them are collapsing. My dad’s team has thus had a saying that these boxes will not collapse when pigs fly.

Then we were done with the mall and decided to head home on the 12:10 ferry. On the ferry it was very windy and the water was quite rough and choppy.

The part I liked the most was being able to understand a little bit more what my dad does as well as seeing what all goes into construction and renovation projects. I think I was most surprised about all the inner workings of a mall, I know it’s not really apart of the job shadow but I kinda found it interesting that there was an office for the owners of the mall as well as many hallways.

I’m not to sure if I would want to pursue a career in this field. It seems to take a lot of work doing drafting and overall construction which I’m not overly good at and I don’t know if I would enjoy it entirely.

The positive aspects of the job is that you can actually see people as well as yourself enjoy the results of a project that you worked on in the real world. The negative parts of it though are that there are many deadlines and stress comes with that as well as that every project you work super, super hard and long hours for a very long period of time.