Interviewing Prep

I went on a sort of “informational interview” today and I definitely recommend the experience. Other than transferring my portfolio layout from a 8.5” x 11” landscape to a 8” x 8” square (which takes way longer than it sounds), I hadn’t done much interview prep. I looked over the company website of course, and had a rough idea of what I thought I could contribute to their process. And I quickly scanned notes from interviews past, right before my meeting, to come up with memorable work stories and questions for the end. However, even this little bit was more than my interviewer had done. She readily admitted to not even having gone to bed the night before, being slightly hung over, with a cold, and more than a little cranky. Nice.

I kind of let all my prep work go out the window at that point, but the experience was still worth it just to hear myself speak, in order to understand that the way I lay things out in my head isn’t necessarily the sequence that they come out while speaking. This was important for two reasons:

• One, I now know to talk my way through my series of question and answers, out loud, several days before an expected interview. This is just knowing yourself. Knowing your one year and five year goals so you’ll understand what you’re aiming at. If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t tell someone how you’ll get there with their company.
• Two, now that I’ve heard all my flubs, I can come back, regroup, and plan more narrative responses that take the interview where I want it to be, rather than where it just ends up. This is simply selling yourself more precisely along the lines that you’ve established.

Now with this hurdle jumped, I think I’ll drop the portfolio rehash / job search / interview prep for a few more weeks to gear up for other deadlines. I liken this semester to a 400m Olympic hurdling race. But more on that later.

 

last night of freedom

It’s the night before architecture school and all through the house, not a creature was stirring . . . . except for my stackable washer/dryer that is rattling a hole into the drywall. But seriously, if I want out, this is it. Otherwise, it’s two years to the right and straight on till morning. So what a better celebrity blurb to stumble upon tonight than Eisenmen’s recent quote in the New York Observer:

If you were a son of mine, I wouldn’t want you to be an architect,” the septuagenarian told this reporter, “because it’s a tough way to be in the world. Look, my son who graduated from law school three years ago makes more than I do after 40 years of working.”

Real estate development anyone? Seriously though, doesn’t he look like the fatherly type? Almost Cosby-ish with that button up and corded sweater? If one of the more famous architects of our time thinks the profession is not good enough for his kids, then why should I think its even close to a good idea for me?

The only thing I might could come up with quickly is flexibility. The ability to work in planning, law, construction, real estate, graphics, and all sorts of other unrelated disciplines in accordance with what your current client is interested in without having to amass all those degrees. And the opportunity to meet new groups of people with varying interests and life experiences with each project. What other type of firm can claim almost any topic under the sun as research?

Or at least I hope those are good enough reasons to keep me entertained for my next 40+, low paying years . . .

 

who you gonna call?

So when you have a city, with great housing stock, an impressive river front, and a well preserved downtown but you don’t see any people . . . what do you do? Design a new museum? Zone for more residential? Build a new live/work development? as an architect, a planner, a developer . . . in which role would you be in a better position to revitalize a downtown? Or to reconnect a strung out suburb?

Today’s visit to downtown Cincinnati was almost a complete lost cause – nothing was open. A nice Sunday afternoon walking in a dense, downtown environment and all the cafes were closed, the (free) botanical gardens were essentially empty, and the few retail shops we found all had their lights out.

But at least that area was unique. It had the townhomes of San Francisco, the hills of Rome, and the riverfront of Jacksonville. The town of Colerain, out by where I was staying, could have been anywhere on the outskirts of all those places. The car lots, the big box stores, the isolated chain restaurants, the fields of parking.

Gas prices were a topic of big concern out there, and how some poorer families were stretched to afford to both drive to work and put food on the table. How do you help an area that has developed so dependently on the car? It would cost billions to completely retrofit the area to be similar to a downtown environment, which is what some urbanists would be having you believe is the best solution.

Are architects all-encompassing enough to assist in the situation? Or are they so limited in scale that their typically single building intervention wouldn’t make a difference? Would a planner have more to offer, even with their lack of being able to see a project through? Or would it be an educated developer, with the money to back a project and a walkable design for an entire district? Who could best step in to lead the way for outerlying suburbs to densify their pre-existing retail/office nodes with transit oriented development? Maybe even a lawyer, with a specialization in zoning and code issues could better help a strung out town develop itself into something recognizable, something with a sense of place, more completely than an architect.