Helping Hand

My name is Michael McIntyre I am going into my second year as a student at Manchester Metropolitan University. I am currently studying Landscape Architecture and then plan to take a further course in Golf Course Design after completing my 3 years at Manchester University.

I first worked at European Golf Design during my School Work Experience week when I was 15 and I then worked for an extra week in the School Summer holidays. I am now 19 and this is the third time I have been given the great opportunity to return to EGD to gain more experience within Golf Course Design.

The people at EGD are very friendly and have welcomed me into the company as one of the team. When I arrived on Monday last week I met Gary who gave me my first task which was to write the text for a course planner on a Golf Course in Bulgaria. This was very interesting but at the same time quite challenging as I had to vary the text ensuring that for each hole I gave, in my opinion the best way the golfer should play the hole. I then went onto work out the stoke indexes, Gary and I worked on this together and put the 18 holes in order of hardest to easiest, this gave us the stoke indexes for the course.

I was impressed with the changes in the office, with a large flat screen TV and comfy sofas, giving me absolute comfort when watching the Olympics with the colleagues. Surprisingly they still continue their lunch time habit of a trip down to Waitrose and I was soon to follow in their footsteps, however everyone did look forward to pizza Friday which was understandable after a week of Waitrose and healthy eating.

I then went onto produce some photo montages on a prospective job. The purpose of these is to try and show what alterations we could make to certain holes on the course to improve them aesthetically and strategically. I produced three montages for the Designers to look at. They gave me their comments on how I could improve on my ideas ie. the shape of a bunker. I made some adjustments and printed off the photo montages.

At the end of my first week I began to work on the strategic design on a layout adding two 9 holes to an existing 9 holes. The routing plan has been laid out and I will be continuing to come up with the more detailed plans throughout next week.

I have really enjoyed my first week at EGD and in just a short space of time have already begun to learn a lot more about Golf Course Design. I am looking forward to carrying out my next challenging tasks during week two however I am unsure what we’ll be watching now the Olympics has finished, the office will be in despair.