Architectural colleges are very intense across the year and across all the semesters. Especially during the exams with all the studying of the year to be crammed up in a few days (Just a few hours to be honest. But, Shh..). And then comes the Jury with many nights shuffling between our drawing boards and the laptop. The drawing board will always have the black finger marks from the pencil work or the unintentional strippling that happened when you dropped the fanciest alcohol marker on the sheet, without the cap, for a millionth time. On the other hand, your AutoCAD will always give you crashing error time and again especially when you just finished filling up the last patch of hatch between those 50 XL lines horizontals and verticals. This still does not justify the panic of the last few days before the jury because the laser cut file for your model (I am not exaggerating, trust me.) will never get it right in the first attempt. So with a heavy heart and empty pocket when you will be returning from the shop after collecting your error-full laser cut jute boards/chip boards/buff board/black boards/corrugated board/everyothernameleft board, You will only have one thought in your head which is – Should I take the silver wire to make the trees with brown sponge (Because cheaper) or i should buy the ready made trees (Because less work) for the 1:200 scale because it will almost go right with my very_off_professor_forced_and_uncomfotable scale of 1:185. This is the time when you decide your time table for the next four days. 2 days to work on drawings, 1 to work on a model and the last day for all the compilation because you got to compose your concept sheets and process on a final sheet size which can only be A0 because that is the maximum your printing guy is going to print.
Now when you are following your plan and it is about to be dawn, you realise two days for drawings are over and you are yet to do a lot more which may take almost one more of your day but wait, you don’t have it. That is the time when you call all of your juniors who have finished their juries or who have them in the coming weeks. Well also the one who have the juries in the same week as you because you need as many hands as you can get. So then you take up the charge of distributing the work to them. Half of them will work on the drawings the other half on the model. Sorted. It is only until the last day when you realise that you still have trees to make for your models, make the site base out of thermocol because everyone in architecture just loves the model that can be inserted in site context, render your 3d views which you thought to do in 3d max this semester, elevations because how important can they weigh over sections, and the contour map with the correct north sign (You did not consider the site slope but the jurors don’t need to know that). So you make a decision that you can curb the time of composing the sheets in less than half a day and can do the rest in the other half. You anyway just have to combine the work that you did during the semester and 3 juries that happened in between and the work you are doing now digitally with the work that you produced manually along with the work that your juniors are doing for you. Sounds like a plan? Sure thing. The jury is next day at 9 am and the day before at 11 pm you have no sheets composed and only half the model ready. But we designers are the people of the dark. Night is the best time to bring out our caliber. After four straight sleepless nights and three cans of redbull for caffeine (Because by third year coffee will no longer have any effects on your body), you motivate yourself by saying “Just one more night to go and then you are going to rock”. Oh no! You forgot to call your printing guy to open the shop at 7.30 am so you can get your prints. Now what can you do? Well you can call them anytime, they signed up for the late night calls when they said that you are their regular customer now.
You see the birds chirping and hear the sun rising because of the caffeine and exhaustion in your body and you press the last control save on your file making it a pdf naming it Finalest_Final_Finalupdated_Finalsheet and copy it to your pendrive to get it printed. You pick out your best shirt and decide to go formal for this jury. You look in the mirror and tell yourself “We are ready to roll”, “or not”. You turn your keys and ride towards the print shop. You give them the pen drive and wait for them to tell you which out of your 20 sheets is showing error so that you start fixing it and recopying it for him to print because you know that always happens. That is why as a precaution you charged your laptop before bringing it with you. With 7 rolls of sheets and a meter long model, you walk into the campus feeling like you are carrying a bazooka. Your professor tells you that you are going third. That is the exact moment when your heart skips a beat because you forgot to bring the tack pins. Time for the pin hunt. You take help of two other friends who will pinup your sheets on the softboards while you work on sequencing the sheets. All of the juniors who helped you are here to see your jury and they brought along their friends too. You feel proud as well as scared to death at the same moment. There is always one junior who will walk up and ask, “Why did you not make the sectional perspective (implies to any drawing) that you always wanted to make?” Same thing happened to you as well and as usual you said “Ah did not get any time but i will surely make it next time”. Only difference is that they all start laughing this time. You wonder WHY? But then you remember, ‘Oh I am in the final semester, this is my last jury’. That little heart break you felt, is real.
