I recently acquired a job within architecture at a firm in Sioux Falls. I am elated to be doing what I love and getting paid for it. I'm only 3 days in and it is getting better each day; I feel I have a steep "common sense" learning curve when it comes to the building industry (they don't teach you basic building staples in school it turns out, they try to teach you creativity... which is stupid), but I've learned so much in the past few days.
However, what I'd like to reflect on is not my current job, but a bit on how I got to this point. If people were to examine my life pre 2004, my choice of "architecture" may seem curious. Even after that point, I didn't attend a college with a legitimate degree in architecture.
In high school, the closest thing to "architecture" that I ever did was attend an exploratory class at Spitznagel (now TSP), and that really didn't teach me much. The one thing I learned is that I should "take an art class." I already knew I was good at art, and that I hated my high school's art teacher, but I took a 3D design class anyway. Lame. Waste of time. Learned nothing. I remember taking a test where there were a series of 4 pictures all with different frequencies and paths of lines. The student was supposed to pick the square that "best represented the concept of Line." All I could remember thinking was that "this is not how you teach design."
Yet I still loved to create and draw. I was always creating things out of Legos and building Puzz-3Ds. I was heavy into Sim City 3000's Building Architect Tool, and would often sketch out creations before actually building the physical models within the program. Then "the Sims" came along and taught one even more about basic space planning (as rudimentary as the game was). After that it was RPG Maker, and I guess you could say I lost the architecture kick and was more interested in pure creation. I created programs, stories, characters. I used Photoshop and (ugh!) Paint to create new monsters or tilesets. And when I wasn't involved with some sort of videogame experience, I was creating music, or creating drama.
Then college rolled around. When it was discovered that my high school counselor was "accidentally" sending out the wrong transcripts to schools, I had a wake up call. I wasn't getting in to the schools I wanted - I wasn't getting scholarships. Life was getting serious. I had to go to college. Luckily, Augustana still took me in, with a scholarship, but they unfortunately didn't have the architecture program I needed. But I loved the place and stuck around. 4 years later I had a degree in Art and a minor in Psychology and Economics.
Now, it was surely time to "get serious." I applied to 4 graduate schools of architecture, from Iowa State all the way up to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. With a great GPA and a stunning artist portfolio, I was a shoe in at all places. But I knew money would be the issue. Thus I found myself at Iowa State University, enrolled in the M. Arch I program and working as a Teaching Assistant in architecture (something I really knew nothing about at that point).
I felt... funny... about having taken so long to finally do what I wanted to do. And I did discover that at Iowa State, architecture is what I wanted to do. Yet I'm very defensive about my experiences. While I am not wise enough to have the legitimate right to proclaim "it is important to have a varied and diverse background for architecture, because it pulls from a variety of disciplines" I still cling to that morsel of info anyway, having heard many a wisened architect utter something similar.
And now, even with what I learned about history and technology and ADA and structure... I feel like I am learning all over again with this job, because, while I can figure out how a building "can" go together, that doesn't mean it should go together that way, or that that is the most effecient or cost effective way for it to go together. But I think that is an important reminder... that education doesn't end outside the classroom. You learn something new everyday.