Amir Afifi

I worked with a general contractor renovating the Beverly Hilton as part of the $10 billion One Beverly Hills development, where several major contractors were delivering interconnected scopes across the site. Because the hotel remained operational throughout construction, logistics, access, noise, and sequencing had to be carefully coordinated around guests, staff, and daily hotel operations.

The schedule was further constrained by major events such as the Golden Globes and the Milken Institute Global Conference, which bring prominent business leaders, public officials, and international guests, including figures such as Jensen Huang and Larry Fink, to the property. These strict deadlines required our team to complete critical work and return affected spaces to hotel operations before each event. Working within these constraints strengthened my scheduling and budget tracking skills. The project also gave me broad exposure to MEP systems, structural work, interiors, and demolition, as well as the coordination required to keep multiple trades productive within an active facility.

I worked with a German-based international design-build façade contractor on the $1.5B Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Nearly every component, aside from standard hardware, was custom fabricated in Germany, Italy, Spain, or the Netherlands. The building’s curved geometry and tight tolerances made accurate field verification and coordination essential.

I contributed to design meetings by documenting as-built conditions in the field and incorporating that information into the project’s 3D models. Because replacement components carried approximately three-week international lead times and the façade systems could not be assembled piecemeal, the team needed to understand how every component would fit before installation. Working between the CAD models and the field, while also managing documentation, procurement, and installation coordination, gave me a practical understanding of both the technical details of the façade systems and the process required to deliver them.

My role at The Boring Company spanned manufacturing, supply-chain operations, and tunnel construction. I developed bills of materials and KPIs to track components used in both tunnel construction and the company’s tunnel-boring machines. Time and cost drove many sourcing decisions: components that were too expensive or slow to procure externally were evaluated as candidates for in-house production.

After a tunnel-boring machine completed excavation, I helped coordinate the tunnel buildout, including electrical distribution for lighting, fire-life-safety systems, ventilation fans, and drainage pumps. This required translating the completed tunnel into an operational piece of infrastructure.

The pace of the company taught me how to approach unfamiliar, first-of-their-kind problems. The most effective process was usually to understand the fundamentals, reduce the problem to its essential constraints, and then learn enough about the system to make an informed decision quickly.

I joined The Cosmopolitan during its acquisition by MGM Resorts International. My internship was divided between rotations through departments responsible for hotel operations and work with the project-development team supporting the planning and design of an MGM resort in Japan.

This gave me exposure to how development teams are structured, how information moves between disciplines, and when different stakeholders enter the design process. I observed land-entitlement, civil, and grading discussions and toured existing properties to understand operational systems and identify practices that could inform future developments. I focused particularly on security infrastructure and lighting-control systems.