Parting Thoughts

By Matt Owens Being the last blog article I will be writing I was thinking about leaving the readers with my thoughts and feelings about the master of architecture program here at SIU. This last article was going to be a summation of my experiences with the conclusion of some profound knowledge of which I gained that will undoubtedly shape the rest of my career in architecture. But for some reason I am just not feeling that as I am typing right now. Its not that I don’t think that the time I spent here at SIU was not important or that I didn’t learn anything. I can tell you it was a useful experience of which I can say will be greatly beneficial to the architecture career I intend to pursue. But right now I just feel like that would be too long of an article to justify my experience here over the past year, and quite frankly I don’t think many people will care. And continuing to speak frankly I don’t think many people will even read it? So instead my final article will be a critic on the blogging experience. In a sense I am leaving the same way I came into the blog for the school of architecture. If you recall, (I’m sure you won’t) my first article stated my feelings about the importance a blog can have for architects, and explained my experience with blogging to that point. I also expressed some excitement that I was going to get a chance to share ideas with fellow grads and we were all going to be better students for it! So for the first several months of assigned blogs I would carefully select a topic of which to discuss. I would search for something that I felt would be the most interesting and beneficial to the rest of my class mates and the reader. But I found out that not many (none) of my classmates were reading the other students blogs. Everyone was treating the blog as another assignment and was doing it just to fill the requirement. Which was somewhat understandable, we as arch students have so much going on that it was difficult to find time to write a blog. I then found myself not caring about the content of my blogs. I can honestly say I have not even visited the blog this semester. So what can I say I gained from the blogging experience? I hate to say nothing, some of the early blogs I wrote involved some research and time, so I can say I gained knowledge about some of those topics. Admittedly I didn’t read many other students blog after the first couple weeks, maybe I just noticed a lack of interest, or it was the fact that we were so busy. I would like to know how many people actually do read this blog? I can only speak on the standpoint of a student writing the article. I still think the blog could be a good idea; I like the thought of students sharing ideas with each other, and potentially having an audience from outside the school. It could be a good look into the culture of the school. I think the delivery of these ideas might benefit from change in format. While we live in the age of the internet and blogs, I think the best way to get something like this out is a good old' fashion newsletter! Once or maybe even twice a semester the school could put out a small publication of sorts. This publication would contain the article and images written by the students, it could also display student projects. Even though the blog is easily accessible I feel the hard copy of a newsletter is easier and students are more likely to pick it up. I realize there is a cost associated with a hard copy, and if you want it to look good it will cost more. But I think a hard copy publication will reach more people and be more effective in displaying the work and ideas of the students in the architecture program at SIUC.