le1107, welcome, and good luck in your first "real" job! And don't stress: I can assure you that school did NOT prepare you for what you need to know, but that's why we architects do internship. Your office will have specific ways of doing things that they will teach you - your role as an intern is to learn and listen and try. My biggest advice to young interns is this: don't be afraid to ask questions! If you are given a task, and half an hour in you find that you are stuck and don't know how to proceed, DO NOT just sit there staring at the paper/screen and hopping some flash of inspiration will come to you, all the while getting more and more nervous that you don't know the answer and are too afraid to ask for help. Every minute you spend afraid to ask is wasting the firm's billable hours on the job! And, the quickest way to get an answer and learn is to ask.

In this situation: come up quickly with ANYTHING you think is a remotely possible solution, even if you see drawbacks. Sketch it/plot it out and hand it to your project manager saying "I know this isn't right, but I'm stuck with how to fix it." Handing your PM something s/he can respond to (and even sketch on top of) is key: even if it only gives them something to react AGAINST, it will get them thinking, and you will learn from that response. Good luck!

Chch, thanks for trying to move the discussion back towards the original inquiry. I think (and le1107's and others' response can attest) that a frank discussion about the frustration we all feel at one time or another is a very helpful resource.

I second that LB - The only way to get your manager's attention is to ask. And dont be afraid of their coffe breath and frazzeled appearance, or the way they seemigly glare at you like they hate you. Thats just the "arch-sheik" look and you to will be just like them.

lol.

very good advice LB. as always.

Good post OldFogey. As a student about to move on to M.Arch in 08, I often wonder the same things as I lie awake at night.

Thanks LB for your post. It seems like that's life and those who deal with it survive, if not succeed.

OldFogey, throughout school, I have wondered that same thing. Why are we expected to know nothing after we've invested so much time and money in "preparing" for this?

Interesting...

Fogey, your post raises a critical issue in the field, of course, but in the context of this thread combined with the lateness of the hour and my tiredness despite having a lot of work still to do, I'll be brief....

By saying school doesn't prepare you for work I mainly mean in terms of office functions: CAD standards, typical details, coordinating specs, coordinating with (prima donna) consultants, door schedules (both what they are and how to put one together), in-house project quality control review procedures, permit filing procedures, even filling out a timesheet.

I would guess that architecture isn't the only field that doesn't teach students how to function on a day to day basis in a professional setting within the discipline. For example, I imagine psychologists learn mainly in school how to interact with/diagnose patients, not the minutia of filing state insurance paperwork, which procedures will vary from office to office anyway.

That's all for now.

I really don't think we are "expected to know nothing", but that school is just the tip of the architectural iceberg. Studio time is a big chunk of school, but there is so much more to the business than that. I admire those that take it all on...marketing, accounting, being responsible for an intern(s) supervision, insurance.....the list goes on.

McTaco, 22yrs old---give yourself some credit! I was 25 before I graduated. Seems the more I age, the more I realize that I don't know as much as I ever thought I did. (Or do.)
I suggest enjoying it. Others have pointed out that there is so much you can do within architecture.

Hi LB!

I just sent you an email, jones....

while i didn't say that school doesn't prepare you for work - because i don't believe that's true - i will try to make the distinction as i understand it. and as i taught it.

in one of the housing studios i did my co-instructor and i (both practitioners) had to make a decision. the school really liked the idea of treating our projects as real projects and shopping them to the local planning/design office and some developers so that the students' ideas could be built and so that we could introduce them to the exigencies of the off-the-boards/into-the-world process.

we decided that this would undermine the speculative, brainstorming, exploring environment we were trying to foster in the studio. if the students had to stop thinking about construction systems and programmatic overlaps and other things that made for interesting 'affordable' explorations and start thinking about the kinds of standard construction these developers would demand, 1 - the studio would have to stop designing RIGHT NOW and start producing and 2 - they wouldn't have made a learning journey in which they gather and synthesize information and exercise their own inventiveness and ability to problem-solve and all the other things that we all think studio is about and they would become architects-in-training prematurely.

there are phases to a career. we have to learn how to make the journey before we get right into production mode or we'll become a VOCATION instead of a PROFESSION. plenty of people are learning to draft in voc school. plenty of people are learning to be project managers at construction firms. the absorbtion of lessons about ethical and professional behavior, the learning how to find things and how to continue to learn (vs learning rote information), enable us to grow and evolve with an evolving profession.

sure school prepares you for work. but it prepares you better for the long marathon that is a career in architecture than it does for the first couple of years of learning your first firms' particular software, office standards, and daily practical tasks.

i think one of the keys for the beginning archi is organization. time and attention needs to be paid about organizing your space, files, projects. all this helps with your time. for example, say you get a project for a house/remodel addition. you need to KNOW things so when mr/mrs. busy principal comes by you can tell them exactly what the allowabel s.f.s rather than scrounge around for it and have them tapping their fingers on the desk and sighing. organization is a key. im(notso)ho.

Fogey, you are irght, but Steven and LB's points are spot on. There are schools that do the two semester school a year pratical office, and perhaps they are few and far between but for those that want that path, it does exist.

Old Fogey

"Gross acceptance of such a wasteful, random system "

Perfect

Keep in mind, from my perspective, two things:

I got a BArch in 1990. My education was, in retrospect and apparently (from what I read here) in comparison to what MArch programs are teaching these days, exceptionally well-rounded. I also had the good fortune of working in firms every summer of my education - so I was seeing both the practice side and the academic side concurrently. This is why I think programs like UCincy DAAP are so valuable: everyone I've met from there has been wicked smart, and they have tons of experience. (Maybe I've only met the cool ones so my view is skewed - hi DubK, SH, mdler, SBD! (oops I haven't met mdler))

And, my comment above "I can assure you that school did NOT prepare you for what you need to know (in an office)" was directed at spankin' new interns who are starting their first jobs now, and was meant to calm their concerns at feeling unprepared and reassure them that they are not alone. That, I feel, is the point of this thread.

I for one am not crazy about seeing this thread derail to our endless academia v. practice discussions, though I do agree with Fogey 100% that it is an issue worth discussing.

Maybe its the academics that are being turned out by the thousands now that are f*cking things up at schools. What I've witnessed since the mid 90's to now is basically complete disconnect of the school world from the profesional world. We laughed when a profesor I had in 1997 through his briefcase into the crowd at a building science lecture and yelled the professor next to him for creating morons, then spouted something at us to the effect of your hopeless as group of students and stormed out leaving his class and teaching job.

He was right though- it was like watching the death of the last pragmatist, sick of trying to save a losing battle and letting them all go to hell.

we only have until 2012 anyway, so rack up those loans and stay in wonderful academia land until then...........

Steven, that was well said. This discussion is very helpful!

i don't beleive for an instant that education has gone down hill in our profession. I know too many good teachers to think that. Even professors who are prgamatic AND creative practitioners....teaching n Europe and North America.

In Japan most profs have a practice and are VERY pragmatic educators, expecting a degree of rigor not very common in the west. The students stil have an enormous amount to learn to work in office.

Nothing wrong with that. Which is LB's very good point.


as an aside, i am working on slightly cool house, with slightly difficult structural requirements (in earthquake land anyway), and we are using a very good engineer who works in the tradition of arup, balmond and so on...that is, he treats engineering as a design problem, and uses technique to support that approach. His staff on other hand are not used to this and are absolutely not taught this approach in japanese university... so now he will spend 5 years or more, most likely, showing them how to be creative engineers who can make good buildings, not merely functional competent ones (which they were capable of, more or less on graduation). The point is that every profession, even plumber, or butcher requires polishing by realworld experience. Maybe architecture requires too much polishing, but in most repects i don't think there is such a real issue.

Apart from creating a guild where kids start working on consruction site at age of 12 i don't see how anyone in early 20's is going to know enough to run a jobsite, do design, and keep financial targets in line anyway... was this EVER possible?