Many students would hesitate to take an internship after just one year of college. But that didn’t stop Ryan Wuebbels.
While many of his peers were settling into summer break, Ryan packed his bags and headed south to Jacksonville, Florida, for a unique opportunity with The Korte Company.
Ryan is a construction management student at Western Kentucky University.
He first became interested in construction as a kid in Salem, Illinois. By age nine, he was already helping his dad with projects around the house and looking for more opportunities to learn.
“I’ve learned stuff over the years with the people that I worked with and the projects I’ve done,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of renovating at people’s houses like framing, roofing, sheathing, siding, plumbing. Since I was little, we’ve always done projects around our house. We built our house, our garage, and built cars.”
Ryan’s extensive hands-on experience helped him land his first internship at Korte, and eventually led him to a jobsite 885 miles from The Korte Company’s home base in Highland, Illinois.
“I wasn’t expecting to get the job because a lot of the people I’ve talked to say they can’t get internships so young,” he said. “But during my interview with Korte, when I told them I had just finished my freshman year, they were actually more excited that I was young and wanted to start interning early on. The people at Korte wanted to know about me and hear about all the work I’ve done since I was a kid. That’s why I went to Florida, because they knew that I was hands-on, and I wanted to go to a site.”
Ryan’s summer project featured a 700,000-square-foot USPS building renovation in Florida. He was particularly excited about the opportunity to work with steel construction, an area he hadn’t gotten to explore much before.
“Getting to work on a project like that is the reason why I wanted to intern here,” he said. “I wanted to become more well-rounded in the construction field. I know quite a bit about wood and residential construction. I wanted to learn about steel and commercial work.”
Ryan embraced the hands-on experience. The team and subcontractors treated him like a full-fledged field engineer. Some of them didn’t even realize he was an intern.
As Ryan finished up the summer, he realized the best advice he could give other interns was to get in the field.
“I’ve learned twice as much as what I learned in college just by actually working on a jobsite,” he said. “Being in the field really opens your eyes, and it has made me more eager to continue working in construction down the road.”
