Oscar's Summer Experience

For the past two years, I have been fortunate enough to intern at Haverstick Designs, an Acoustical Consulting firm in Indianapolis, Indiana. Haverstick Designs specializes in architectural acoustics, doing acoustical testing, analysis, and design for various types of spaces including recording studios, houses of worship, home theaters, restaurants, conference rooms, and any other places where sound can be important! It’s a small business, and I very much enjoyed being able to work hand-in-hand and learn much from the owner, Gavin Haverstick. He is highly regarded in the acoustical consulting world, and I learned much from him!

While working there, I had the opportunity to participate in various projects from start to finish. I worked on the testing and design of restaurants, recording studios, and various houses of worship, conducting on-site testing and creating models and designs from that testing. It was great experience and I left the internship even more excited to work in this field in the future!

To me, the most important thing I learned at Haverstick Designs was that acoustics is simultaneously subjective and objective. While this may seem like a contradictory statement, it holds much truth and is, in my opinion, the key to strong acoustical design. While we worked hard to tailor each design to the wants and needs of our particular clients, like any other engineering team we worked hard to conduct concrete testing to provide quantifiable metrics that we could base our designs off of. By using these quantifiable testing methods, we were able to approach the artistic aspect of acoustics from a scientific point of view to create incredibly unique designs! My experience at Haverstick Designs was a lot of fun, and I am extraordinarily thankful to the people I was lucky enough to work with. They taught me much about the world of acoustics and acoustical design, and I feel very prepared for the future because of it! 

Oscar is one of the founding co-hosts and producers of our IDES of Engineering Podcast. Oscar and his co-host Zach Beyer named the podcast, organized and conducted the interviews, produced the episodes, and even wrote the music showcased throughout the series. We can't thank Oscar and Zach enough for their expertise and talent to get this podcast where it is today!