Go big or stay unemployed.

I’ve had some luck in the last week. By luck I mean that my search does not feel stagnant. It’s not truckin’ along admittedly. It hasn’t resulted in any big job offers. But I’ve revised what I expect. I think we all must do this, to keep our optimism up.

I found an angel. Her name is Kelly Simpson and she lives somewhere north of Spokane in Canada. She says she has really neat handwriting (to which she attributes most of her job-winning success), won an ASLA Student Award years back, was recruited by Design Workshop and now has decided she’d rather live in a small Canadian town with a ski mountain nearby and become a nurse. But she was quick to say that she didn’t want to dissuade me from following my own path into landscape architecture – she just realized landscape architecture didn’t fit into her recipe for balance and lifestyle. And THIS is why I love her. Kelly searches for balance in life which resonates with me. Last spring a Denver landscape architect came to speak at the University of Arizona. His firm seemed to be right up my alley – a smallish firm that pursued interesting urban, public projects. How should I position myself to work for a firm like his, I wondered? He suggested to some of us eager students over breakfast at the Arizona Inn that we search for positions with the big gun firms because doing our duty in cubicles and basements with AutoCAD for a while would set us on the track for bigger and better jobs fueled by big-name experience…. I took in a big breath filled with excitement over a fresh career ahead of me that may begin with a job that may include relationships with people who call me “the CAD-bunny”. Kelly reiterated this. She said that many of the smaller firms will scoop you up because they want to know the tricks you learned at Design Workshop or Sasaki or wherever. Plus, you’ve already made it through their fine grained filter and all of this makes you a more desirable future employee. A job like this would be alright for a while, I rationalized. I still believe this. I’m still willing to do that. But I do need to hear that after gaining a bit of experience, I will have more of an ability to shape the way my work and life will interact. Kelly said that sometimes, simply having good people around you to work with and supervisors who care about you personally as well as professionally, makes any office setting fulfilling.

Later that week I met with Doug Allan, the Associate Dean of the College of Architecture and Planning at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. My dad worked with him in the 1980s and said he ‘is a real nice guy’. He is. He is also a landscape architect by trade who has been teaching for the past 30+ years. Doug also talked about the “big firms”. He pulled out an engineering weekly newspaper. The topic this week explored how the big firms, and by “big” I mean, multi-national, gargantuan, could-take-over-a-small-country “big”, survived in this economy. Doug, a southerner to the bone, talked with excitement over projects that designed towns of 500,000. In some cases, he said, “it’s like the dogs who caught the car” (they take on more than they know what to do with) and in others the process is so nested and so long that it becomes rote, “like eatin’ eeegggs for five years” (you get tired of eggs). But right now, it’s successful and keeps firms above water. On my list of firms to check out I’ve added: HOK, CH2M Hill, Perkins and Will and Dar-Al-Handaseh/Shair & Partners.