Room with a View

Back in the day (three years ago), the job hunt began by searching job-listing sites and firms for open positions (which existed) and lobbying for them by sending out your portfolio, calling the firm, inquiring about projects, what they need and how your skills fit (it was a two-way street back then). When a firm was interested in hiring you (had made an offer), you were often flown to out to interview. Maybe you had to foot that bill yourself but with the prospect of a salary down the road, and at the very least a nice lunch or coffee on the firm, it seemed like the future was bright and health insurance was on the horizon.

Yesterday, as it began to hail on Highway 15 heading north, I searched for a place with wi-fi so I could check on the 15 or so firms that I’d sent inquiries to in the last month. I knew that none of them had positions but I have made a checklist of all my potential employers (they all have said they envision openings in six months or so) and am religiously touching base with them, flirting with being annoying, sitting on the knife edge of persistent/obnoxious, hoping that the moment a position opens they think of me. This means that in Elko, Nevada I sat at a table near the biker gear at the Flying Jay (even truckers need the internet). I pulled into a parking lot at a Best Western in northern California that advertised “wi-fi” and had to ask someone unloading their car if they knew the password. I poached a computer at the Idaho State University campus in Pocatello. And when a firm says “sure, we’d like to see what you’ve got”, I either send them a digital copy of my portfolio or I find the nearest Kinkos/Fast Copy/small-town-copy-shop and print one off. If they say, “sure, come on in, we’d love to talk to you”, I route myself wherever it may be to do that.

My dad called the other night and ran down the list of opportunities and firms with whom I’ve been corresponding.

HIM: “How about VWA?”

ME: “They aren’t making decisions until the end of August”.

HIM: “How about the Fulbright?”

ME: “They won’t know until the end of September”.

HIM: “How about the fancy-firm-in-Boston?”

ME: “Even though I had a great conversation with the principal about the big, new project they are starting, I haven’t gotten even an iota of response since”.

I appreciate that my dad is engaged with this process. I’m not annoyed by having to report my rejections, whine about my dwindling savings account or revise my strategy on simply keeping my head above water (maybe being a CAD-monkey wouldn’t be so bad… maybe getting part-time work with the retail shop I worked at in college would be a way to get by… oh, they’re not hiring either? Maybe I’ll put my name in with a temp agency”. My dad’s supportive of whatever I choose and as I drive around the West. When I almost ran out of gas in southern Montana (my gas gauge is broken so I flirt with this possibility often), he called back a couple hours later to make sure I wasn’t stranded on the side of the road. He knows there’s nothing he can do about my job search or my gas tank. As my excitement about the independence of the open road (literally and figuratively) starts to feel like loneliness on this journey, he’s not reminding me of the seriousness of my unemployment. He’s just supportive.

“What’s that noise Rach?”, he asks as I stand and pace the top of a picnic table set up on my friend Mark’s front porch. I’m camped in Mark’s living room for a couple days. Mark works for the Parks Service in Teton National Park and his porch faces the snow covered Grand Teton as it rises out of the Wyoming plain. The noise my dad’s hearing are bison who are roaming the aspen at the end of plain just below me. They are snorting. The baby bison that were born this summer often sit in the road next to Mark’s house (as do the tourists who line up to photograph the apathetic animals).

“You should tell fancy-Boston-principal that life as an unemployed landscape architect isn’t so bad right now. You’ve got ‘neighborhood bison’ in your front yard”.

My dad is right. In fact, as I write this, I’m sitting in the front room of generous family friends Kim and Al. They built a straw bale house in the mountains around Missoula. They happen to be in Seattle right now but have graciously allowed me to stay. A deer wandered in front of the window this morning as I drank coffee and contemplated the job hunt strategy for the day. I am going to contact the Forest Service, I’ve decided. There are a handful of temporary job openings around the country and Vic Lyons (Forest Service dude in the Tahoe basin) said it makes all the difference to find out WHO is responsible for filling those positions and getting in touch with them. So that’s what I’ll do. Then I’ll go for a trail run.

from Tucson to Tahoe

Tucson, Arizona

Dick Williams is 90-something years old and still writing books, documenting over 50 years of professional experience as an architect, landscape architect and teacher (among many other things I’m sure). He had us (my design partner and I) over for drinks (something involving soda water, vodka and orange flavored Metamucil I think) a couple weeks ago as school ended in Tucson. Carol and I had won a design competition that he sponsored and he wanted to talk to us about our aspirations and future. Partly because he is a bit deaf and partly because he really enjoyed bestowing his own advice upon us, we listened to Dick’s forecast of the profession. Dick said that he too graduated during a recession, the Great Depression (we haven’t yet reached the “capital” D or gained a “Great” like the Great Wall or New Zealand’s Great Walks) and he thought this was a good thing. In my anticipation of being done with school and the responsibilities of life (credit card payments without student loans, a mortgage, eating three meals a day without an income) not yet sinking in fully, I had also formulated why this recession seemed to be good for us. Dick’s reiteration was comforting. The recession is forcing us to live more modestly, think about the essentials in life, refocus on what really matters, be less consumptive which trickles down to destroying less of our natural spaces, throwing less away and driving less. It means (more concretely for our profession) that the focus of projects will shift heavily away from private projects (ie: “new community projects”, a euphemism for “big subdivision sprawl”) to public projects and infill projects. Even though my only job prospect at the time was to keep my bartending job at the Rialto Theatre, the fact that Dick has a beautiful house in a classy neighborhood in Tucson made me think long-term poverty wasn’t going to befall me. I mean, he weathered the Great Depression and this was still just a little “r” recession.

I packed my truck about two weeks later, rented out my room to cover most of my mortgage and headed north to spend the summer visiting friends and firms, without huge expectations and luckily without any responsibilities except myself to sustain. I sold most of my clothes, packed away some in bins and felt even a bit lucky that I wasn’t choosing between many labor hungry firms throwing cushy salaries at me. This was a time to travel and look leisurely at places, firms and organizations. I took my computer, an electronic version of my portfolio, my resume and writing samples.




Lake Tahoe, CA

As I jump back into a job search again (I have to take it in spurts or risk getting totally jaded) and just thought i'd give ASLA's joblink a gander. I entered what i thought were loose search terms. "landscape architect", "entry level", ANY state. "Sorry, no records found".

Hmmm... boys and girls, I think we are up sh*# creek without a paddle. I mean, we are going to have to really get creative on this hunt. I am thinking of starting my own greeting card business with "hope your job search goes well" or "sympathy on your unemployment" or the rare but jubilant "congratulations on getting a job!" focus. My "to do" list includes regions to explore (exciting) and bills and real-world tasks to stay on top of (not so exciting), and writing this blog which has become the highlight of my job search. I'm just afraid that no one wants to hear me rant or sling sarcastic comments about consistent rejection. I did get some encouraging advice from Issac, a construction worker in NM who said that a job agency in Taos is looking for servers and hospitality (read: toilet bowl cleaners) at the ski resort for the winter. He said it with such sincerity for my well being that I had to seem interested for his sake. So with those prospects my strategy is to look not to MAKING money but saving it. A friend from grad school is moving into my house. I moved into my car. My car moved to Tahoe, soon to Montana. I eat PB and J for 2 of three meals.

I'm trying to think of other ways to capitalize on the "recession" a la the Great Depression. Maybe I can take forlorn photos of myself like Dorthea Lange did of DustBowl farmers. I need some children...

Naw... see, the sarcasm is getting the better of me. I just got off the Selway and Payette Rivers in ID and am hanging out with a friend in Tahoe (not a shabby place to be sipping coffee and job searching). I do miss the monsoons and friends in Tucson, though.

The Forest Service, Tahoe Basin

D.C. (I'm not going to use their names - I am not sure how they'd feel about that) is a cool dude. He wore a California style berret. He likes to mountain bike. He said he started his career in small firms in southern California and then moved to the Forest Service. I had found a Forest Service listing for Tahoe and quickly applied for it. D.C. said, unfortunately the position was a "detail" and thus I wasn't eligible. But, like other LAs who seem genuinely interested in talking to me about strategies to get a job, we talked about the best way to get a foot in the door. He suggested applying for internships. The Forest Service has an internship program called the Career Ladder Internship Program. As our talk moved towards the best mountain bike trails in the area and his new bike I realized how important that personal connection is. There may not be a job now... but when there is, hopefully D.C. will remember what a cool, hip, qualified, motivated person I am. Being just another portfolio on CD on a desk does very little good, it seems.

Sacramento, CA

Tahoe was 75 degrees. Highway 50 to Sacramento was glutted with heading-home Bay area tourists. Sacramento was 98. My AC makes my car overheat so I turned it on while going downhill, off while going uphill or in traffic. I changed from my longish sleeve black “interview top” which was quickly getting sweaty, into a tank top at a traffic light in Placerville. I changed back while ducking behind my car door at the EDAW parking lot. Lesson 1: If presentation matters (which everyone says it does), don’t interview in the summer in hot California valley towns. I looked like I had just gone for a run.

J.Z. is a senior LA at EDAW-Sacramento. He invited me down to review my portfolio and talk job-acquisition-strategy. I was appreciative since he too said, yup, they aren’t hiring. In fact, they have consolidated their staff. But he believes that the downturn will only last a couple more months. Then they will be hiring.

He liked my portfolio. He talked about the niche that he heads in the company – landscape restoration and recreation projects. EDAW is a big place. It had three secretaries and most folks sat in cubicles. But John was down to earth as were the other LAs I met. The restoration projects posted on the wall were interesting and I felt like this was an arena I knew little about but was excited at the prospect of learning. The planning studio, run by another man, did urban design projects (more familiar to me). The California transit line that will eventually connect northern and southern CA (neat), some high profile public plaza spaces, a new city in Vietnam which looked like a modern, gridded Versaille in plan (who knows what the landscape originally looked like. I imagined Vietnamese rice paddies, square in shape but essentially a productive wetland… and sadly the man who was working on it said he’d never been to Vietnam but had heard about it from his boss). My five minute exposure to the project surely does not allow me to understand it fully. I am woo-ed, I admit, by the travel opportunities, the cool perspectives of high rises and French curve green spaces and an Asian aesthetic crispness and willingness to go big or go home… and yet it sent a shiver down my spine. It made me wonder if, for the sake of a being employed and making my mortgage, I’d take a job that asked me to plat out cul-de-sacs in the desert or grid a wetland (with environmental rationalization of course. But it’s this rationalization I find dangerous). I’ve been told over and over that these types of projects are the bread and butter of many firms. We can’t all work on public greenway projects. But I have a mortgage (did I mention that yet?)

Only a week in California and ALL my job prospects were ones that I heard about through connections I had made through friends and friends of friends. Lesson - make ANY connection possible. GO in. MEET. MAKE an impression. GIVE them something to remember you by (something that makes you distinctive). KEEP in touch afterwards.

I changed back into my tank top at a gas station next to I-80 and headed north towards Idaho. Boise seems like a cool town.

Graduate. Roll dice.

A number of people, including articles in Landscape Architecture Magazine written by well known and successful landscape architects suggested that one way to weather the economic belly flop is to start a blog. I am not sure that a blog will stick my name and portfolio under the right noses (not likely) but it hopefully will make other newly graduated, unemployed, jobless but not aimless or goal-less people like me chuckle. As we slowly graduate into this economy and our student loans become active and hungry, we have either chosen to hunker down in our own proverbial tornado shelters OR hit the road with Kerouac's books on tape and a trail of family and friends who can both offer a couch, good company and an internet connection. Both strategies involve a constant fishing for opportunities (the "I'd do that" list gets longer every day. When my mom's neighbor asks me advice about rose pruning and proper grass care, I used to politely remind her that I didn't get a Masters in Garden Care. Now I'm considering feigning rose and grass expertise, maybe even printing a business card and starting a business to compete with the 14 year old boys down the street who mow lawns for 30 bucks a pop).

But really, here's the deal. I just graduated. I am talented. It doesn't seem to matter. In many ways I am happy that there are not five fantastic firms throwing big salaries my way. I have no strings, no obligations and lots of people and places I've been wanting to see but have not because my head has been buried in Photoshop, AutoCAD and InDesign for the past three years.

I like to travel. The last ten years of my life has been a hop-scotch game between countries around the world and experiences. I like to write. Thus so far the doom and gloom of the recession hasn't given me too much anxiety.

I will use this blog to reflect on my own path and experiences. I hope that people who read it will feel lightened that we are all in a similar boat. Our training made us "Jacks and Jills" of many trades (and, as the saying goes, "Masters of none"... but we don't need to dwell on that) and that variety, open-mindedness and broad skill base will serve us well. We need to share experiences, learn collectively from this new employment climate and keep in mind that people will always need creative, beautiful, natural spaces and the environment will always need our attention, protection and respect. We'll all be fine.

So here goes (please excuse the blog-beginner... I'll figure it out)!

Start: Tucson, Arizona