Marissa Andrews completed grad school during the pandemic and launched her career virtually. Today she’s fully immersed in DG’s culture. She shares her journey from isolated student to deeply involved professional working on some of our largest healthcare projects.
There was a time during graduate school, just a few years ago, when it was hard for me to imagine working side-by-side with a client and fellow architects and planners on a project, let alone one of real significance.
I was halfway through my master’s program at Miami University when the pandemic hit. Many of my classmates lost internships because firms were uncertain how long COVID isolation would last, and whether or not projects would continue – or start at all. I, however, was one of the lucky ones. DesignGroup had offered me a summer position and honored the commitment. It was the opportunity I needed, at a time I thought it might never happen.
This was the summer of 2020, and despite working from home, that internship introduced me to DesignGroup’s largest project ever: the new 2 million square foot Inpatient Hospital at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Within days, I was working on actual construction drawings. I could hardly believe it was happening.
My internship consisted of many, many Teams calls and OneNote checklists our team used to collaborate virtually. Despite the isolation from one another, we made it work, and I came out of that summer having learned a ton — with the specific goal of continuing in healthcare architecture.
Fast Forward
A year later, DesignGroup offered me a full-time position and I’ve been working in healthcare design ever since. It was a dream come true, and yet not at all what I expected. Yes, by now we had all returned to the office. But in my case, the office was still kind of remote: a construction trailer in the shadow of that massive new inpatient tower at OSU. For more than a year, I got to see the project I worked on as an intern actually be built!
I loved my time on site – I could spin my chair to ask questions or walk into the building itself to check on something specific (like inwall details or toilet pod installations). Watching what I drew on paper become real and seeing for the first time the various issues that come up during construction, influenced how I will document projects for the rest of my career.
In the background of working on this and other projects, I was studying hard to take the six exams required to become a Registered Architect. My original goal was to be done with the exams within two years of finishing grad school. After struggling to study and work at the same time during my first eighteen months post-graduation, I decided the best thing to do was focus on work to get the experience I needed to pass. Two years later, in 2024, I passed my final three exams.
Just as I’d hoped, those two years working proved to be formative and inspiring. My DesignGroup managers assigned me to the new emergency department at the Trauma and Critical Care Center at Grant Medical Center, which I got to see from the end of schematic design through construction documents. In early phases, I worked with planners to imagine the space in different ways, and I helped the senior project architect draw details that would bring the design to life. I helped design and build different mock-ups of the treatment room, and I was in every client meeting, working directly with them to create the best space possible.
After all that, preparation for those exams was much faster and easier. I was able to connect study materials and test questions to my experiences with Grant and Ohio State. It was not the path I had planned, but I came out a better architect. That experience made all the difference. I’m now working on OhioHealth’s Dublin Methodist Hospital expansion, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s the largest planned expansion for the Hospital since it opened in 2008.
Mentorship is Key
During my time on each of those projects, I worked with expert teams from both DesignGroup and our partner firms. I always had someone to turn to with my questions. I was good at asking questions; during my internship, I called senior project architects with even longer lists of queries, which they would patiently go through one by one. Today, instead of questions about markups I’d been given, I ask about details I drew from start to finish, to get them just right.
Without the mentorship I received, I would have been overwhelmed by these large-scale projects and their hundreds of sheets of drawings. But DesignGroup took the time to help me understand both the details and the big picture. It prepared me to be a Project Architect who is confident in tackling projects of any scale, from small, single-room renovations to a new patient tower. I will always be thankful for the teammates and mentorship that got me to this point.
