by Dr. Jennifer Smolka
Architecture & Construction
Cluster Specialist
As a parent, there are few rights of passage which can be
more fun ... and more stressful than college visits with your senior year in
high school. My second son, Mark, is a
senior at Waxahachie High School and he had figured out what he wanted to be
his major: Architecture. This wasn’t a
complete surprise since Mark always had this incredible eye for spatial
reasoning and was a whiz at building with Legos when he was younger. That spatial eye has allowed him to excel at
pool and golf where it’s all about the lines and angles. But as he was growing up he went through
several career choices. There was the
police force and more specially a K-9 officer that combined his sense of
justice and his love of dogs. Then for a
long time, I thought he might do something like a game warden that continues
along the justice path but layers in his pastimes of hunting game and
birds. But when he decided on
Architecture, it really seemed to fit and since I had just become involved in
CTE & Architecture at UNT, I couldn’t believe the synchronicity of it.
Last year, we began looking at the eight
different universities that had Colleges of Architectures and he narrowed down
where he wanted to go: Texas A & M
or Texas Tech University. This Red
Raider mom couldn’t be more excited to think that one of our four boys would
attend the school where I met my husband.
We scheduled our visit to be able to attend a football game on the same
weekend and the three of us headed out in November for a college visit.
The campus tour was a nostalgic walk down memory lane for me
and I could just envision Mark walking the same paths that we had over twenty
years ago. With the campus tour over, we
made our way across campus to the Architecture building that is one of the
tallest buildings on campus giving the department on the top floor the
impressive view across the West Texas Plains.
(Yes, it really is flat!)
We were able to have scheduled a visit with the department
to learn more about the program.
Encourage your seniors to visit with departments and faculty of the
actual programs at the university. Each
campus and each group of faculty will have a different culture and you’ll want
to make sure that you fit in to the entire environment.
Our guide discussed the programs and the various options for
an academic degree program that best fit each learner. Students can combine engineering, business,
and construction as possible double majors and there is even a five-year program
that combines the undergraduate and graduate degrees. As an administrator and faculty member in
higher education for the last twenty years, I was impressed.
We were shown different design
projects that students at various levels had been creating and we heard
about how much effort and rigor went in the program studies.
Students had been known to build hammocks under their
drafting tables in order to catch a little sleep while working on big design
projects. In fact, the building is known
as “Motel 6” because there is always a light on. The building is set up with 24-hour security
guards and keypads so that students can always have the access to the design
spaces.
The department has thoughtfully considered what an
architecture student needs to be able to create authentic design projects to include
in their design portfolio in a professional way. The College of Architecture at Texas Tech is
really like it’s own little island which may make one of the largest physical
campuses seem just a little bit smaller.
Within the 10-story building, the COA has its own two-story Library with books, materials, and a
reference librarian to help students on course projects and research.
The COA also has their own Print Shop that can do professional posters, publications,
presentations – you name it they can print it in any format and any size.
Just around the corner, a photography studio has been set up with the space and tools for
digital photography of models and 3-D projects.
The have SLR cameras and video cameras that students can checkout or use
in the design space to create artifacts for their portfolios.
Finally, they have so many different types of Workshop spaces that you could create
anything from anything including wood, metal, and even plastic 3-D
printers.
Perhaps one of my favorite elements of
the program is the study-abroad
requirement in the summer between the junior and senior year. On my own travels abroad, the architecture of
the churches, castles and museums that have lasted hundreds or thousands of
years is awe-inspiring. It makes me
wonder what would an archecture program be without the opportunity to study
first hand the historical aspects and the cultural influences in the field.
It’s clear that if you want to create and design “art that
we live in” (CITATION), this would be an incredible opportunity to learn in an
authentic, hands-on, design environment.
At some point in the tour, I realized
that I was more engrossed in the program offerings than my son was. As we were walking, he was working on a small
box puzzle that our guide had given the two potential students. Figuring out how it worked enthralled Mark. How do you put the six-notched pieces
together to form a cube?
But he was somewhat quite and not asking questions like dear
old mom. Something was amiss. What was this boy of mine thinking?
This right of passage for a parent taking their child on
college tours (and even to their own alma mater) is heavy. It means our children are getting ready to
leave the nest. Have we given them all
of the skills, knowledge … and dispositions… to make it this world today? But even more critical is this right of
passage for our children. They are
preparing to leave their safety net and venture out where they have to make
their own decisions and they get to take those first steps towards the rest of
the future. For some, deciding what to
study and where to go may have been part of their family destiny. For others, it takes really knowing yourself and
examining the possibilities.
We could tell at dinner that night that something wasn’t
sitting well with Mark. This was an
incredible place to go to study Architecture, but it wasn’t clicking and he
couldn’t quite express why. It was hard
as parents to not push and prod. But
given some space and the quiet of a hotel room in the middle of the night, Mark
figured it out.
Remember those design projects that we saw at the very
beginning of the tour? That was the
key. Mark doesn’t feel the creative
juices to design boxes that flow; he has the mind of the puzzlemaker figuring
out how to make everything work. While
he still wants to design, he wants to do it from the structural side of things
and it clicked for him to begin looking for Structural or Civil Engineering
programs.
He asked if I would be disappointed if this took him to
someplace other than Texas Tech University since I was so excited to be sharing
our history with him. I told him, that
Texas Tech would also be an incredible special place for me. Without it, I would not be who I was
today. My love of higher education was
definitely planted in the culture and community of Raider Land. And I met my husband there and our dreams and
family will always have roots on the campus of Texas Tech.
But all we really want for our sons is to find their place
in this world. While I found “IT” in the
windy West Texas plains of Lubbock, I let Mark know that where he found “IT”
was fine … as long as it was his very own “IT”.
