Architecture, more than a profession, becomes a weird kind of addiction as time passes by. From exploring different styles of design to studying building bylaws, there is so much to learn that you might hate the profession while studying it, but also couldn’t live without noticing it. Let’s quickly go through this love-hate relationship and how it impacts our lives as well as the lives of people around us.
Love at first sight
When you join this course, you will be fascinated by the innovations and visually appealing designs. You couldn’t wait to explore and design something interesting. Everyone would be full of energy and creative ideas, trying to interact with their seniors and feeling lucky that they didn’t join some theory-based profession. The seniors however would seem completely done with life, aggressively wanting to know why you joined this course and why you feel that architecture is easy if your drawing and sketching are good. But the ones blinded by love always fail to see the warnings. The first two years pass by as you learn to draft, sketch, conceptualize, and prepare models like an architect. By the end of 2nd year, things start getting a bit serious, but you would still find yourself in a happy space eventually.
The realisation
Halfway through the course, you realize that slowly, the complexities of design are increasing. You are made to identify so many different factors that would restrict the design ideas. You are introduced to various software, sustainability criteria, structural stability of your design, and lots more, all at once. The jurors start getting stricter, working nights start to increase, and redoes become more common. The course takes up so much of your time that you cannot have a life apart from architecture. Anywhere you go, whatever you do, it somehow gets related to architecture. This is when you realize that architecture is no joke. The profession is much more difficult than one would imagine but in a different way. Architecture is a subjective course. There may be guidelines to suggest how a particular space can function, but there are no guidelines to suggest how the space needs to be designed. You have to bring a certain degree of maturity when it comes to justifying your design and that’s where the course seems difficult.
Mixed feelings
Soon, you may start analyzing your past decision about wanting to join this course. There will be a time when you may not get to sleep for multiple nights to finish off your work and still manage to look fresh, presentable, and prepared for the jury. There will be design models that you may have made putting in a lot of effort, sometimes even making your family help you out, and those models may go unnoticed in the jury. Amid this chaos, you will also realize that architecture has also helped you grow as a person. It has made you more responsive and responsible towards your surroundings. It has also helped you understand different types of people and their lifestyles by the means of case studies that you conducted for various design topics. Architecture has helped to improve your analytical capabilities and decision-making powers by constantly putting you in time-bound situations. So, you carry on with mixed feelings for this course as you enter a new chapter called internship!
A glimpse into your future
The internship will make you realize that whatever you experienced in college as a student is not even close to how your professional life as an architect will be. Up until now, you were in a protective shell, where you had a scope to rectify your errors but, in the professional world, there is a very tight margin for errors. While you finally come to terms with the untidy and disrupted sleep schedule, the internship will bring another massive turn in your lifestyle and as you start settling into this professional world, it will soon be time for you to get back to pursuing your degree!
The last dance
Despite the mixed feelings about this course, the final year will be a time when you will want to give your all. It is a year when you get to select your topic, conduct your research, prepare your design programs, and execute the design all by yourself. The final year will be one of the most impactful years of your life as all the responsibilities related to your design will need to be managed by you within a given time frame. Once you get through your final jury, you will not just come out as an architect but also as a highly mature being. All those times when you felt you couldn’t make it through but somehow managed to scrape through, times when the nights felt too short to finish your work, and times, when you looked to score well but also wanted to actively participate in college fests, will be etched in your memory forever. After staying 24/7 with this profession, you will realize that architecture had the greatest impact on your willpower by teaching you that whenever you feel you can’t do it, just work, stay patient, and keep pushing yourself to the limits. You shall get there eventually.
