How to spend your summer before third year
Having come to the end of our final year of architecture school as undergraduates, we have written a post with suggestions of ways you can spend your summer before third year, drawing points from our own experiences.
Whilst it’s important to take a break, it’s also good to prepare for the upcoming academic year, especially when it accounts for a significant amount of your degree. Take the points below as our recommendation and with a pinch of salt because we’re only one of many platforms with a unique set of experiences of architectural study at undergraduate level!
1. Get experience
Showing enthusiasm about architecture and presenting a well put together portfolio of your current university work can be enough for a studio or firm to offer experience, even if you feel you have nothing to offer at this point in your career. Whether this is for an internship or simply work shadowing, you can learn a lot from being in a work environment as the architecture work life is vastly different from the education system. Getting experience not only expands your knowledge of a firm, but it also gives an opportunity to work on your team skills by collaborating with others. Some degrees, such as ours at Westminster, may have a module dedicated to professional practice and this experience can also give you a helpful insight into knowledge of building codes and regulations, which may be relevant to this module.
2. Learn new software/developing your existing skills
Practising your skills, whether that’s analogue model-making, improving your drawing skills or improving your proficiency in a certain software is a great use of your time and will benefit you in the upcoming academic year. Third year is intense, so you want to minimise the amount of time you spend trying to figure out how to do something when you could be advancing or excelling in your project. You can learn and expand these skills by taking courses or by teaching yourself. For example, you might take one of your drawings or views from second semester and dedicate time to improving it on platforms like Photoshop by teaching yourself more efficient ways of using the tools and creating higher quality of work. We have a range of blog posts on digital skills that you can check out under the ‘Tutorials’ section on our site, and our resources post has a bunch of recommendations for places you can look to for useful up-skilling content.
3. Get a head start on your dissertation
Most people advise to start thinking about your dissertation topic as a head start before starting the academic year. Whether it be completely nailing it down to the specifics or having a vague idea of which topic you want to research into, deduce your options so you know what you chose is definitely something you will enjoy writing about.
It is common for universities to run workshops or other types of academic sessions for students to attend which help ease you into the concept of a dissertation and how to initially prepare for it. We would definitely recommend attending these sessions especially if this is your first time writing a long academic piece of writing. At our university specifically, there were academic sessions that ran across the year teaching the basics of dissertations, literature reviews, formatting long documents etc… (For reference, you can attend these sessions regardless of which year you’re in!) Take time to think about and finalise your topic, which will then help you know where to look to find your sources for the research you’ll need to undertake. Some universities might even have a synopsis deadline within the first month of being back at university, expecting you to get started on the dissertation at the end of your summer break.
4. Participate in a competition
Participating in competitions not only reaps benefits in the form of incentives such as recognition and prizes, but also sets out a good framework for you to develop your skills with a structured process of some sort. They can also be a great opportunity to put your existing skills to the test without the pressure of grades and marks to see how far you’ve come in your architectural studies. Entering a competition might be the best time to go back and work on some projects and bring them up to a better and new standard. It is always great for employees to see that you are engaging with architecture outside of your previous or ongoing studies. They are also great ways of making your portfolio and yourself as a designer stand out from the crowd.
5. Spend time exploring non-architecture related interests
Third year comes with more freedom in the area you’ll choose to explore with your projects. Invest some time in the things that you’re passionate about whilst you’re not tied down by uni work. It could feed into your third year work in ways as simple as a certain graphic style inspired by some artists you’re interested in, or inspire the whole concept of your design work. Plus, adding to your skillset on top of architecture will make you stand out against other employees when job-hunting. On the contrary, don’t feel forced to associate a future project with a hobby that you take up during the holidays. Sometimes your interests naturally seep into projects and other times they develop from your projects, so no pressure.
This point was recently raised in a podcast episode by Gabriel Chek (archlogbook) with Baran Demir (arkitolks) and we definitely agree with the points that they mentioned. It is very common and understandable why designers like ourselves face burnout. One of the simple ways of bouncing back from this is by spending time on things that may have piqued your interest in the previous academic year which you couldn’t find the time to do. Feel free to check it out on YouTube.
6. Portfolio/CV
Getting a head start with laying out and preparing (or updating) a portfolio and CV of your work so far, will only put you ahead of the game in applying for jobs when that time comes around, making the whole application process much smoother, as you don’t want to be thinking about your job portfolio and CV in the midst of your third year projects.
Even if you feel as though the work you have produced so far isn’t good enough, even creating a template with assigned sections for images and important text can significantly reduce the time it takes to create the portfolio/CV in the future.
Whilst this is a non-exhaustive list of things you can do to prepare during the summer break between second and third year of your undergraduate studies, remember that it’s still wise to rest and recharge during this period whilst you have the time.
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See you next week for another blog post :)
