“We’ve waded through about 60 applications,” Doak said. “We got a bigger response than we expected.”
Doak and his staff at Renaissance Golf Design pored through the applications and chose two interns in early April.
“It was really hard to sort through them,” Doak said. “Now I know what college admissions officers feel like. You just get a lot of good applications and it’s hard to try to pick among them.”
The two interns Doak and his staff selected were George Waters, 24, who is a master’s candidate at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and Philippe Binette, 21, a junior at the University of Montreal. Doak said the two would probably begin working with the company in early May.
While Doak has had interns before, this is the first time he has gone through a formal process, he said.
“We’ve had interns at various times over the last 10 years, but it’s been hard to do a formal program because our workload varies so much from one year to the next,” Doak said.
Going forward, Doak said he plans to award at least two internships a year to college students pursuing a career in golf design through a landscape architecture or turf management curriculum. Each internship will consist of three parts: a month in the firm’s Traverse City office, four to six weeks of work on the site of a current project and at least two weeks of travel with Doak or a senior design associate to see projects in the planning phase, including an opportunity to see and play some of the great golf courses built in the last century.
“We want to give them not only office experience, but some experience in the field and if we didn’t have much going to construction in a particular summer, it was hard to set anything up,” Doak said. “We do 25 percent of the design in the office and 75 percent out in the field. Certainly, if there’s a chance for them to work with us longer term, that’s where they’re going to contribute.”
The positions will pay $5,000 for three months, plus housing and expenses while in Traverse City, as well as all travel expenses while on the road.
The program Doak has proposed mirrors his progression as a golf course architect. Upon graduation from Cornell, Doak received a scholarship to study the great golf courses of the British Isles, an experience he followed with an apprenticeship with Pete Dye. These two experiences helped shape Doak’s design style and gave him an entry into the design field that others may not have had.
“I feel like whoever we do pick, we’re giving them a leg up like I had 20 years ago,” he said. “As far as my career went, having that experience was crucial to my being able to get out on my own.”
One reason Doak decided to formalize the internship program at his firm was the volume of work Renaissance will have this year, he said.
“We’ve got enough lined up for the next couple of years that we’ve got some interesting things going on,” he said. “This summer, we have a couple of renovation things we’re doing and we’ll have somewhere between one and three golf courses start construction and we’re still looking at other new projects.”
Among the projects Renaissance has lined up is a private equity club on the shores of Lake Oconee in Georgia called the Harmony Club.
Doak’s highly-rated Pacific Dunes Golf club in Bandon, Ore., has led to some of the work his firm is currently undertaking, he said.
“We’ve gotten at least two new jobs out of people that played the golf course and loved it,” Doak said.
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