Events

Dear Class of 2020

May 28, 2020

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Dear Class of 2020,

With your recent graduation, many leaders are sharing videos to celebrate this important milestone in your career and welcoming you into our humble industry of architecture. I agree with their positive words of encouragement and echo their sentiment that our industry desperately needs you! However, as someone who once stood in your shoes, I felt the best offering I could make was a dose of reality and some hard-earned lessons from my journey.

Perhaps you’ve been told that this moment isn’t normal. That’s a true statement for most of the world; however, that’s not a true statement for you. This will be the story of how your graduation year looked for the rest of your life. Others will not know the depth of what this reality means for you. Your family and future work colleagues will generally get the gist. It will only be the people who experienced this same moment in time and had to navigate it with the same level of uncertainty who will entirely understand. When you talk to them about it at a future point in time, you may or may not admit how challenging it was, but you will always remember how it felt.

As a graduate during the Great Recession, here are five lessons for entering the field of architecture during a historic economic disruption:

Lesson 1: Be adaptive. The rules have changed. What they taught in school, what your parents did, what your mentors are saying, and even what I’m offering now… will not be entirely applicable at this moment. The task on your shoulders is to get comfortable with unexpected change, start thinking outside the box, and start looking for opportunities where you can be adaptive.

Lesson 2: Be persistent. This moment is a hard one, and it’s going to become increasingly challenging from this point forward. If you want to stay in this industry, you are going to have to fight for it. At some point, every person who achieves any form of success realizes it only comes at the result of hard work. Stepping into a mindset of persistence will be your best skill as you move forward on this journey. There will be good days and bad, as well as setbacks. You can overcome all of it with persistence and determination. You will be required to work hard every step of the way and earn every significant milestone.

Lesson 3: Be creative. Use your education to think creatively about what you are capable of doing and the types of jobs where you might apply your design training. Many of my friends ventured into architecture adjacent careers during the last Recession, which either helped them later step back into a full-time job in architecture or aligned them on a path where their skills shined on something equally exciting. Do not box yourself in, but instead use design thinking to navigate how you solve all problems.

Lesson 4: Be patient. During the Recession, I felt like it would never end. It was such a significant disruption for my early career and my expectations that I was apprehensive I would ever regain the lost time and my professional footing. While it took a while, eventually, the world started moving again. So did my career, and I realized I was finally part of an exclusive group of people who qualified with a certain number of desirable years of experience in our industry. Prepare yourself for the long game and be ready for when that moment arrives.

Lesson 5: Hold onto the vision you have for yourself. While you are watching the Pandemic unfold, take time to write down who you hope to be in your career at this moment in time. You may spend a year or more doing something different than you want to. When the moment has passed you can revisit what your vision for yourself originally was. Are your aspirations still the same? Has anything changed? Can you take steps forward towards what is important to you?

To close, I encourage you to prepare for the fact that it will be an unpredictable year. The path that is about to unfold will be uniquely yours to walk and write. In your moments of uncertainty and doubt, know that you are not alone on this journey. You will find your way through this, and you will be more resilient on the other side.

Congratulations on this critical, and hard-earned milestone!

Sincerely,

A friend from the class of 2009.

Author: Je’Nen Chastain