Toxic Traits You Need to Leave Behind Before You Start Working In Architecture
The transition from university to the workplace can be both an exhilarating and challenging phase in your career. As you prepare yourself for this significant shift, we’d advise you to take a moment to reflect on the toxic traits that you might have unknowingly crept into your mindset when studying architecture. By recognising and leaving these traits behind you can cultivate a positive work environment and give yourself the opportunity to have a fresh start in this new chapter of your life.
So, grab a cup of coffee and keep reading to explore what these traits are and why it’s important to bid them farewell as you enter the world of architecture as a professional. Trust us, it’ll be worth your time!
Competitiveness
We are not eliminating friendly rivalry since the majority of the time this act is very temporary and results in better outcomes for those involved. We still want to promote motivation and drive when working on submissions or deadlines but once students become really competitive it can get to a certain point where the studio culture is tainted.
Back when we were at university, we started to witness students stealing each other’s ideas but not being upfront about who they owed credit to or what provoked their ideas. Students lie about or are secretive about their grades so they do not develop the image of a ‘weaker’ student - we all have our ups and downs. The lack of communication to develop our skills by learning from each other because the last thing you want is someone in the studio receiving a better mark than you from the help of your continuous feedback conversations. This applies to digital skills too.
In other words, the word ‘collaboration’ is the last thing that is promoted within a studio culture where the majority of students gate keep information from each other to ensure their own academic safety. The reason why we want to highlight these is because inevitably the same type of behaviour will be transferred over to the work field resulting in a toxic working environment too. To minimise this from happening, the unhealthy competitiveness trait needs to be put behind you before you begin a new chapter in your life or we’ll continue to witness individuals going head-to-head in the workplace and it can get really ugly sometimes.
Gatekeeping & Elitism
Gatekeeping is a trait that follows from the competitive nature of the design studio environment. The mindset of not sharing information, which would most definitely help the people around you, just so you can predict their progress and ensure your standings in the marking is extremely unhealthy and will only develop into more serious communication issues down the line.
During architecture school, we assume our followers are extremely dedicated to doing the best they can whilst enjoying their time at university, but there are also individuals who won’t be taking their education as seriously as you are. As a result of that, you’ll find that the group turning up on tutorial days will deplete in numbers as the year goes by for various reasons. Having discussed with students recently, students as described previously adopt unrealistic expectations from both their tutors and their peers and has everyone else wondering where the self-entitlement has stemmed from concluding that architecture school has also created an environment for elitism. Commonly, you’ll find these students expecting higher grades than what they deserve, last-minute tutorials to discuss everything in bulk right before the deadline and snappy behaviour towards their peers who have actually been making the effort to turn up to all their tutorials. Soon after joining the architecture workplace, students with these traits will be humbled very quickly by experienced senior members because in this field graduating doesn’t get you to the end goal and practising in an office will put the industry into proper context. We always say that fresh graduates are at the bottom of the food chain so the elitism needs to end before it’s dragged into the workplace.
Perfectionism
The ‘perfectionist’ character is very popular in architecture schools. The nature of the subject gets students to focus on all aspects of a project throughout their modules thus we become individuals who nitpick at everything and aim to resolve all issues in a design idea. In reality, architects and their design teams have more than just a semester’s worth of time to tackle design problems. Nothing is really resolved until the project comes to an end because no one is able to guarantee that everything will go as planned. So, the ‘perfectionist’ character is quite flawed in the circumstance of having to stray away from solid decisions when a problem has arisen that can not be answered by the default tricks up someone’s sleeve.
Swap this out for enhanced problem-solving and developing a detachment from projects because, at the end of the day, you are here to resolve a client’s issues not your own. Once the project is complete, you move on to the next. There'll be many times when you’ll say, “I wish we had done this instead.”, “If only we had known this earlier on.”, or “I could have come up with a better idea if I had more time to concentrate solely on that.”. Stop… it won’t change the past so just learn from your mistakes and move on. Anyways, we don’t believe you can deem a piece of architecture as perfect and even if it was possible it’ll be very subjective and never a general consensus.
Like everyone questions, “What is the true definition of good architecture?”
This week’s post was influenced both by personal experiences and discussions with previous and current architecture students and thought it would be useful to give a heads-up to some things you may be faced with.
These are just our thoughts and could differ on a student-to-student basis. We are likely to have even missed other attributes which people would benefit from reviewing before the next chapter of their lives.
Until next week, why don’t you head on over to our Instagram, @archidabble, to join the community there too where we post content related to Architecture, being an Architecture student, working in Architecture and more!
