Architecture is a professional course, and it demands a lot of commitment. Our life revolves around designs, submissions, deadlines, and… submissions and… deadlines and… submissions. We spend our days complaining, discussing designs, making submissions, thinking over with your friends and professors, and wondering why am I here and how is this going to help me ever in my life.
Initially, I thought of writing an article describing a typical ‘day’ in the life of an architecture student, but then I realised that a day is too fuzzy a limit for us. We sleep when we drop to the floor or during our 10-min break. We wake up and get back to our work, which seems never-ending while secretly wishing to go back to sleep. We barely survive on coffee and feel like the work will take us to the end of our days. Therefore, we do not know when a day starts or ends.
The new academic year starts with new juniors flocking in and a strange smell of fear is felt in the air. The same old faces look unfamiliar because the normal amount of sleep has taken away the dreadfully acquired zombie features. To the architecture students who come back, the break is both replenishing and a bit too much. The quick change from a workaholic to jobless does that to a person. The freshers on the other hand are little creatures who are chirpy, radiant, and excited. They try to take part in everything, look around the college, and believe that their college life is going to be similar to the ones their friends are going to live who are in non-architectural fields. Perhaps their young minds are too innocent.
Each semester begins at a very slow pace. Students are not really in a mood to study, and the teachers are not really in the mood to teach. This time is all about enjoying with friends and slowly preparing for the coming days.
The next month is when the teachers realise that their mood doesn’t matter anymore because the course is lagging. We, by this time, have already been given the design project but are still in the analysis phase where you pretend you are working, but you rip the info off the internet, and slowly but steadily we are bombarded with assignments. This is the month where our gears are oiled and slowly get back our superpower of multi-tasking.
So now the game of juggling starts between the design, submissions, and extracurricular activities. Friends and family start complaining about not caring enough. They are unable to understand that caring would involve having time that we don’t have. This is the month where our friends think we have died because they haven’t seen us around for ages. During this month we tend to lock ourselves in a room or studio, work day and night, drink mugs of coffee and just eat, sleep, work, and repeat! We keep on working to the best of our abilities, and truly believe that we will never make it, but keep somehow continuing working.
Guess what; we made it. Month five, the rest of the submissions are done by now and the only thing left is the final jury. Now you may think most of our work is done, but it’s nowhere near completion. We keep working till the jury time and even though we are told to get some sleep before the jury day, most of us don’t.
Finally, the most intense day approaches – The Jury. Everyone keeps wishing for more time before the jury, but quite literally we would have done the same amount of work or maybe a bit more, even if we had more time. After the jurors review our projects and tell what is wrong in our project and why we can never become an architect, we somehow go back to our rooms, and finally, till someone tries to wake us up, we sleep happily ever after.
This is a semester in the life of an architecture student. “Always done, never done” is what every architecture student swears by.
