Hi! I am Yeliz, a 3rd year student of Architecture-Urban and Regional Planning double major at Istanbul Technical University. I would like to share with you my experiences during my 30-day office internship at MUUM.

MUUM is an architecture office that designs on many scales with an environmental and human focus. Before I started my internship, I had many prejudices. However, I found MuuM to be far from a boring office environment. It has been a very instructive experience for me, to be able to ask my questions whenever I want and to be able to communicate easily with everyone in the office where the open office logic is adopted. Unlike other offices, the ideas of the interns are considered important here, and interns are included in the project by assigning them various tasks.

During my internship, I was involved in a villa project on the land on the Kaş/Çukurbağ peninsula and the pod design projects. In the Kaş project, I focused on area analysis. In the pod project, we discussed how we can propose innovations to the already existing pod designs and make them more functional, where and how we can use them. Apart from these, I had the opportunity to see the operation of two more projects at different scales. Within the scope of these projects, I worked on model making, modelling, visualization, presentation and layout preparation. I learned a lot about modeling in Revit and Sketchup, visualization in Photoshop and Illustrator, preparing gifs to make the data more understandable and impressive, presentation techniques in Indesign and Powerpoint, and I really feel that I have improved in these subjects. The architectural education we receive at school is only a guide for us. How we do the job, our relationship with the employer, unlike the utopian projects we do at school; We can learn how grounded projects emerge, only through the experiences we have gained during our internships. For this reason, while dealing with the presentation and visualization parts of the projects, I also participated in the meetings and gained experience in relations with the employer. As in everything else, I realized that questioning and asking the right questions, which are at the beginning of the design process, are very important in the design of even the smallest object, from general to specific.

I feel that my perspective has changed and developed in a short time thanks to the conversations I had with Murat Aksu during lunch breaks, the working environment, work disciplines, meetings, presentations and many more that I can’t count. I would also like to thank the MUUM team for giving me this chance and teaching me.