David Hecht

Atrium Environmental Health and Safety Services, Virginia

During the summer of 2006, I worked for Atrium Environmental and Safety Services of Reston, Virginia. Atrium provides practical and cost effective solutions to a wide array of environmental and safety problems. Atrium successfully supports industrial clients, commercial property owners, construction and engineering companies, academic institutions, municipal governments, public utilities clients, and government agencies. Throughout my internship I worked under Vic D'Amato who was the head CIH (Certified Industrial Hygienist) and conducted most of Atrium's fieldwork. A brief description of duties that I performed included: writing reports, doing field analysis, creating presentations for current clients and conducting statistical analysis.

During my internship I worked on three main projects. The first project I was significantly involved in was testing for Legionella contamination at a federal facility in Washington DC. During this project I went to the federal facility and conducted a visual walkthrough to try to discover all possible contamination sites and then conducted sampling of those potential contamination sites. In addition, I sat in on meetings with various federal officials and learned a great deal about how the government copes with potential environmental safety issues and how we had to address this incident since it had become public. This project gave me a new-found understanding of how the federal government worked and how the process can be vastly different than dealing with a private entity.

The second project I worked on was indoor air quality testing at a hospital in Virginia. During this project, I conducted a wide array of testing of indoor air quality and possible mold contamination at the site. During this experience I learned how to operate indoor/outdoor air monitoring equipment, how to identify potential mold contamination sites and did a lot of reading on the health effects of mold. At the end of the project I wrote the final report and it was submitted to the client with recommendations for remediation and decreasing overall exposure.

Although I did a lot of fieldwork, I also spent a lot of time in the office doing statistical analysis. The third project I was involved in was conducting analysis on welding exposure data for an upcoming court case. During this project I looked at thousands of pieces of data and conducted a wide array of statistical analyses that attempted to identify whether a particular plaintiff's exposure to manganese during welding operations was significant enough to cause Parkinson-like symptoms. This was a very interesting experience because I had to do a lot of background reading on the subject, familiarize myself with very technical literature and fully understand many federal OSHA regulations. Although the process was laborious, I learned a lot about occupational safety, federal regulations, and how to conduct complicated statistical analyses of data. In addition it provided me with an opportunity to improve my research skills before doing my senior integrative project.

My objectives for the past summer were to learn about how government and business deal with health and environmental issues. My internship experience with Atrium Environmental and Safety Services was an extremely valuable experience and helped me meet these objectives. I learned how to conduct sampling on a wide array of environmental and safety issues and how to write technical as well as less complicated project reports. During this internship I learned a completely different way to write and this may be the most valuable lesson of the summer. As a government major I did not have any experience with technical writing and experience with it during the internship will be very useful in the future.

During the fall semester I will be completing a senior integrative project on nuclear power in the United States, specifically, how the federal government could provide incentives for energy companies to build nuclear plants and help reduce carbon emissions. Although my internship was not in that area it did provide me with a set of skills that I will use as I complete my project. I will be writing on a very technical subject, so my experience this summer in explaining complex government regulations and safety and environment issues will be useful in explaining many of the intricate issues (regulatory and safety) that are associated with nuclear power plant development. In addition I learned how to search many government databases and this will be useful when I have to investigate many of the regulations that govern the nuclear industry during the research process of my independent study.