How to Survive Architecture_Part 1: The Architecture Family.

By Brittney Mount

I would like to dedicate my next few blogs to topics I believe are the keys to making it through an architecture degree. The first being the family you inherit.

The bonds that are created within the architecture program are the kind that just cannot be broken. Your freshman year, you are tossed into this insane atmosphere with no clue as to what you have gotten yourself into, and it of course helps to love what you are doing, but what really gets you through are those that are going through it with you. I suppose I wanted to touch this topic because I am feeling slightly nostalgic. I was the type that had my group of friends from high school and that was all I needed. This past weekend I had the opportunity to stand beside one of my best friends in her wedding, but she wasn’t from high school. I have known her since my first day of freshman studio a little over three years ago, and we bonded over our stupid iPhone cases believe it or not, along with my incredibly terrible ability to draw and her raw incredible ability to draw. All it took was that one intense double studio summer to become best friends. We bonded over anything from the Backstreet Boys to sharing the best colors of all the candies (you know, the pink starbursts and red spree chewies, obviously) to sloths, which I still am not sure how that even started, but three years later there I was. A part of this milestone.  

When junior year arrived we had to split into our majors, architecture and interior design, and I was devastated. Thankfully I expanded my group of friends, and even though they all literally moved on to the “real world” and I stayed here we still manage to keep up with each other’s lives (thank you group chat, which literally went off while writing this).

You would think that with all of the time we spend together in classes during the day, and studio at night we would want a break from each other, but you really just can’t break away from them. I mean who else is going to listen to you complain about proper line weights, your model scale being wrong, or the new AutoCAD changes?