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Document 5 of 8. Copyright 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Architectural Record January 1998 SECTION: DIALOGUE; Pg. 20 LENGTH: 1433 words HEADLINE: SPEAK OUT: Becoming an architect: opportunities abound! BYLINE: LEE W. WALDREP; Lee W. Waldrep is assistant dean for academic affairs in the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He graduated with a Master of Architecture from Arizona State University and completed a doctorate in counseling and student development at The American University. Waldrep is currently writing a book entitled Becoming an Architect: From Legos to Licensure. BODY: If a young person who wanted to be an architect sought your advice, what would you do? Would you encourage him or her by sharing the positive aspects of the profession -- the creativity and variety it offers, in addition to the opportunity to im-prove the quality of life by affecting the built environment? Or would you highlight the negatives -- five to seven years of schooling, a minimum three-year internship, a daunting licensing exam, and long hours with low pay? As an educational administrator, I meet aspiring architects every day. I encourage them wholeheartedly, providing them with the statis- tics and resources they need to make an informed career choice. I tell them that for trained archi-tects, opportunities abound. An architectural education can be the springboard to a variety of careers. Statistics from the United States Department of Labor project that by 2005 the number of positions available to architects will increase by 25,000 to a total of 121,000 jobs. National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) statistics indicate that by 2005 there will be 60,000 graduates vying for those 25,000 positions. Based on these numbers, we should immediately shut down half the architectural degree programs before supply overwhelms demand. But consider this: According to 1991 American Institute of Archi-tects statistics, one-sixth (more than 8,000) of AIA members indicated that their primary professional activities were outside an architectural firm or private practice. Both the AIA and the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) emphasize alternative careers for trained architects. In Career Options: Opportunities through Architecture, the AIAS lists more than 100 disciplines where architecture graduates can apply their skills. As an architect, you may have colleagues who are earning their livelihoods in related fields. In fact, you may be one who has entered a field that builds on your education as an architect. In the spring issue of its college newsletter, Texas A&M University profiled two graduates who capitalized on their education as architects, one to become an Air Force instructor and one a sculptor. Anecdotal estimates suggest that only 50 percent of graduates enter the profession and become licensed architects. If this is true, we should not be worrying about closing down architecture programs. Rather, we should be finding ways to show graduating architecture students how their hard-won skills can contribute to success in a variety of fields. Conversely, our schools and professional organizations should be networking
http://www2.lib.ku.edu:2052/universe/document?_m=b519ece2936bd246e1a389882d64d46... 3/8/2003
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with other professional and business groups, informing them of the broad, creative, problem-solving skills that trained architects possess. One need not become a licensed, practicing architect to make a contribution with these skills. One resource designed to help future ''educated-as-architects'' graduates is Careers in Architec-ture: Choices, Pathways, Success. Published by the AIA, this book devotes a full chapter to ''looking beyond architecture,'' highlighting careers in landscape architecture, interior design, lighting design, acoustical design, engineering, construction, urban and regional plan- ning, environmental and behavioral research, and architectural history, theory, and criticism. As the chapter concludes, ''the bottom line is that the building enterprise is an exceedingly broad field; the possibilities are endless.'' So the next time a young man or woman comes to you inquiring about becoming an architect, you can feel confident giving him or her your complete encouragement. We need more architects who are not architects. As Leslie Kanes Weisman of the New Jersey Institute of Tech-nology recently said, ''Architectural graduates are in command of the powerful problem-defining and problem-solving skills of a designer. I am certain that they will be fully capable of designing their own imaginative careers by creating new definitions of meaningful work for architects that are embedded in the social landscape of human activity and life's events.'' URL: http://www.archrecord.com LOAD-DATE: January 29, 1998
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