Name: Fatema Sheikh

Class Year: 2017

Internship Placement: I was an intern at MKThink, a design and architecture firm in San Francisco. I was placed under the Innovation Studio within the firm and had the opportunity to pursue a project to later present to my colleagues.

What’s happening? We’d love to hear how your internship is going.

I spent the summer in San Francisco interning for MKThink. MKThink is an architecture firm that in addition to traditional design, integrates data, strategy, and innovation is its core product. During the first couple of weeks, I got to know everyone at the company, do a space utilization study for a client, write a think piece for the company’s website, and decide on a topic.

The last couple of weeks, I narrowed and focused my topic of choice and decided to write a report on sustainable design typologies around the world, with a heavy focus on the bay area. I had the opportunity to interview some amazing professionals about what makes good sustainable design tick and how it can be scaled to have more impact. At the end, I presented my findings to the office and experienced genuine enthusiasm and interest in my work.

Ultimately, this internship helped me realize that good design has the capacity to significantly affect our lives for the better.

How I heard about this internship

In the winter of 2014, I was looking up possible opportunities for the upcoming summer. I knew I was interested in design and data but didn’t want to pigeonhole myself by doing something that was exclusively design or data. I found out, through some newsletter, that a few Haverford students had interned with this really cool firm in San Francisco under the Whitehead internship. After emailing several people many times back and forth about eligibility, I was finally able to secure a place through LILAC funding.