Opportunity Knocks: Advice to New Graduates
Posted: February 27th, 2009 | Author: Scott Simpson | Filed under: Education, Professional practice | Tags: architecture education, architecture students |A new class of architecture graduates is about to enter the profession, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The economic crisis has affected nearly all industries and markets, and design is hardly immune. Firms across the country are reporting rapidly diminishing backlogs, scarce prospects for new work, and significant staff cuts, even at the senior levels. Those firms that are weathering the storm, at least so far, are not hiring. The next generation of designers has a lot to offer: They are tech-savvy and full of ideas; they care deeply about the environment and are convinced that design can make a difference. Unfortunately, many of them also carry a heavy load of debt. There’s a real risk that this next cohort of talent could fall victim to the bad economy and leave the profession altogether. What’s a young graduate to do in these troubled times?
Start by recognizing that while things are tough, the sun still comes up every morning. Stay calm. The economy is down but not dead. Much of your success will be dictated not by circumstance but by attitude, and this is something over which you have a great deal of control:
1. Know that your education is a long-term investment and that nobody can repossess it, no matter how much money you owe.
2. Remember that when you start at the very bottom, the only way to go is up. From this, you will gain great resilience and self-confidence.
3. Understand that design school is as much about a way of thinking as it is about making objects called buildings. Use this to broaden your perspective.
4. Recognize that lots of things get designed — both products and processes. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about bricks and mortar to matter.
5. Investigate programs such as the Peace Corps, Habitat for Humanity, or the U.S. Agency for International Development. There’s a need for your skill set out there somewhere.
6. No matter what, don’t waste your downtime. Consider travel, which is always enlightening.
7. Get a job on a construction site … any job will do. This will open your eyes in ways you cannot begin to imagine.
8. Build a house on an abandoned lot with recycled materials. Show the world that good design can be had at any price.
9. Maintain your sense of humor and stay optimistic. Nobody likes a whiner.
10. Realize that this may be the first but it’s certainly not the last recession you’ll ever encounter, so maintain perspective.
11. Poverty is not fatal if you do it right. Stay alert … you might actually learn something.
12. Study history: What great buildings were created during severe economic times? (Hint: the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center are two examples.) Emulate.
13. Consider extending your education into law, business, environmental science, public health, etc. Concerned about cost? See Item 1.
14. Assume that you’re immune to the bad economy. Decide to get a job, and one will appear. Good intentions are very powerful, and luck does play a role.
15. Be humble and grateful. Remember that there are lots of people in the world who are much worse off than you are.
16. Keep dreaming and sketching. Maintain a diary or a journal, then convert this into a best seller (a novel, movie script, pop song, or opera will do!). Remember that J.K. Rowling was a welfare mom when she wrote the first Harry Potter book, and now she’s richer than the Queen of England — literally.
In other words, don’t let yourself be defined by a job. Keep thinking like a designer. Designers are problem solvers. They are open to new ideas. They understand systems. They appreciate how the big picture depends on the smallest details. And they know that what they do makes a difference … at any age.
This is a great action plan that ought to kick-start both an external and internal search and uplift the spirits of many who will soon be - or already are - looking for work. But perhaps the readers of DI and this blog are too limited of an audience for the balm and succor found herein? Many not yet exposed to the future thinking of DI need this list like a lifesaver and need it now.
One suggestion for further diffusion might be to reprint this post as a 4-color poster to be placed on job boards in every architecture school. Another would be to turn it into a PDF file that can be virally email-blasted to not only those soon-to-graduate, but also those still in school who might have been counting on a summer internship, as well as those that graduated in the past year who - because “last hired/first fired” - perhaps are in the greatest need of the thoughtful and hopeful content of this holistic if not exhaustive post. Another idea might be to include a 17th item - and leave it blank - for the reader to fill in, making the post/list truly interactive, somewhat like “The Chapter 18 Project” which invites readers to write their own last chapter to Thomas Friedman’s 17 chapter Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Perhaps a small prize could be offered for the best idea or suggestion?
It might just be this sort of interaction and involvement that gets the would-be jobseeker to use their creativity and sensibilities in their search. “Opportunity Knocks” implies that we may have to go at least part-way to the graduating student’s door in order for them to do what is necessary to come to us.
Rowling’s experience is ridiculous (though at least ‘welfare’ existed for her). Yet, I wonder why she, apparently literate :-), had such low income?
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