Architecture and Design Career Day

This is Career Day fare for interior design architecture, industrial. I really like coming here. You get to talk to lots of different companies. It's a really good way to network, make connections, and potentially get an email from them so they can hire you. So I've been talking to a lot of people, and, you know, it's really great to establish a connection to show my work in comparison to the work that the firms are producing to sort of establish a common ground. Talking to them is a really good way to do that because you get to see what their vision is. You get to see what their goals are, and you get to see if that aligns with your personality and your personal goals and your personal endeavors. That match is extremely important. There's enough firms here to where you can choose exactly who you want to work for. My career is extremely important to me, obviously. Finding someone who overlaps with what I believe in is extremely important. It's amazing to see, like how strong our alumni is. It's amazing to see how many people come here to offer opportunities to all these different students. Like, I just think it's amazing. I remembered coming to this career fair, and even if it wasn't a firm that I ended up interning for, I researched the firms. I looked them up. I looked at their websites. I got familiar with their work, and firms stuck with me if they were ones that I spoke with or I had a really good conversation with and I'd come back to them the next year. We try to give a very broad spectrum of anything from construction administration, getting out in the field, working on projects, doing space planning, maybe helping with renderings, sort of a wide scope of things. This is the next generation of designers, and they're gonna be who we're working with in the next couple of years. So why not have them start getting to know us in what we do? Because even if we don't work with them, they might work with someone that we end up working with down the road. Having, like, a company that I feel like aligns with more, I think you're just gonna enjoy the overall environment. And I feel like that's the main reason why we all do this is because we want a better environment. We want to create, better environments for other people. We're honestly looking more for personality, someone who's driven, someone who's excited about design, wants to learn because you're at school to learn how to design. We can teach you the programs, we can teach you the vendors that we use and the lingo, but that just passion is something that's kind of innate to individual students. And that's what talking with people here really kind of helps me figure out as I'm recruiting and looking for students to hire. I would say this helps me talk about myself because I think everyone has a difficult time talking about themselves and, like, what they do and their aspirations. It helps just simply be better about talking. It's a really good way for interview questions or, like, asking somebody like a friend or family member be like, Hey, can you ask me a couple of questions and just kind of play around that and see, like, how well you're going to, like, exute yourself, how well you're gonna talk, how well you're gonna present yourself, which is really important when it comes to the professional field. It's a really good way to practice. I always tell them polish up your graphics. Really think about your portfolio, and think about your resume and think about it from a graphic perspective. And then also tell a little bit about your personality. I love to see when people have artwork or anything that they're interested in. We've had some really interesting resumes with backgrounds and what people enjoy. Talk to as many people as possible. Because as students, you might have in your head an idea of what you want to do. But in the reality, there's so much out there that you can do with your degree. You could intern for a place that you never thought about, and it might be what you fall in love. That's how I ended up where I'm at. I took an internship at a place that I didn't really think about. I kind of fell into the internship, and I fell in love, and now I've worked there for over ten years.