Just before I arrived, I got a funky text from a friend of mine who is in the ASU architecture masters program, to the effect that today he learned that I'm the poster boy for the company. Apparently, due to the fantastic architecture market, it should be little surprise that there are few internships available in the valley, if any. So, ASU's architecture program offers a 2 week professional practice substitute, where industry professionals come in and speak. One of our principals was there today, along with Eddie Jones of Jones Studio, and it is my hunch that his calender is wide open, too.
How bad is the market for architects? A former coworker got hired by a small boutique firm that slowly laid everybody off except for him and the principal. And then they cut their hours back, and finally, he had to be laid off and the firm closed. Two architects who owned and leased a strip mall finally tossed in the towel and opened a coffee shop in uptown Phoenix called "Urban Beans." The vast majority of the students I graduated with either left town, changed fields, or are unemployed. The good news is that things are finally starting to look a little better.
Personally, I've been astronomically lucky. I've swum in the center of concentric rings of luck. I was lucky to get an internship at this firm, I was lucky that when I was ready to find work, they were hiring. I was lucky that the firm has been working in the valley for 60 years and so had a pool of relationships wide and deep enough to sustain their business. I've been lucky to work on a lengthy profitable project, while many people in my office who did not have the luck to be attached to a major project were gradually let go as their smaller projects finished and were not replaced. I've been lucky to have worked with excellent coworkers and supervisors who look out for me and who say nice things about me.
By choosing to go to college now, and leave this position, I don't feel like I'm abusing my luck, since my position will probably be filled people already at the firm who really need the billable time. Luck isn't totally random either- there's a saying:
Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity.It suggests you can effect your own luck. It also suggests that there are two types of unlucky people- people who are either unprepared for opportunity, and those who are prepared, but for whom the opportunity doesn't come.
When I was traveling around Europe with my friend Chase, we seemed to be surrounded by an aura of incredibly fantastic luck. Despite frequently showing up at the wrong train stations, we made every single train we intended to catch, sometimes with minutes to spare. The one day we bought a subway ticket was the day that the subway police checked it. We thought we'd missed a night train out of Berlin, but we hung around the train station thinking about what to do for the night, when the train conductor came running after us. On an unscheduled detour to Budapest where we had done no research on where to go or stay, Chase happened to run into the English-speaking city director of tourism. I was almost to the point where I started looking around for Chase's "guardian angel." I think now that really, Chase was just very, very open to opportunity, and flexible enough in the backpacker mindset that we were prepared for almost anything.
I think that's really one thing I love about travel- its not so much a trip outside of your home as it is a trip outside your mind. Some people don't really travel this way- the ones that go to Hawaii every summer, mentally, they never leave home, the old mental roadblocks are always there, and the wiring is fused tight. Travel shakes that up for me. It rewires my brain, makes me a different person that I enjoy being. At risk, in danger of opportunities, open minded so that everything is new and nothing is strange.
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