An Open Letter to Graduating Landscape Architecture Students

Posted On Jun 8, 2020 By admin With Comments Off

Dear graduating landscape architecture student, I am thinking here of you all as you graduate–Congratulations and well done! You have expended a great deal of experience and money the last several years to get your degree. You have worked hard and are entering a royal and fulfilling professing, one that can provide a good life for you. I made a career change to become a landscape architect, and I have never searched back. I have traveled and lived in ways beyond my wildest dreams. I suffer my world and those around me in a more augmenting path than I ever could have imagined because of my training and work as a landscape architect. This is there for you too. You are also recruiting the workplace in an epic meter of skepticism from the COVID-1 9 pandemic. Now the really hard work begins. No skepticism you are anxious about finding a job and overtook with the current fiscal prognosi and state of the world. I can’t say that everything will work out the nature you thought it would or are willing to and that it will not be hard, but I do want to leave you with a few expects from my own experience to give you encouragement and perspective to persist and pursue your dreams of being a landscape architect and making a difference in people’s lives for the better. So please remember: You are uniquely studied and talented as decorators. Engineers pattern with concrete, architects with “bricks and mortar”, landscape architects with acre, grunge, water, and embeds. We are all systems intellectuals but landscape architects uniquely design for landscape systems–for natural process, natural resources, and parties; for both natural and cultural rights plans. We cause the surrounds and views that connect beings to one another and to nature and we design habitat for other living genus. We design at all different proportions: from the backyard, to the neighborhood, metropoli, sphere, and globe. Now now more than ever, the world needs what landscape architects have to offer. We are human beings and humans need to connect with each other and be outside. Landscape architects need to show our quality in a way that others are open to receiving what we have to offer because no matter how you define sustainability–zero carbon, zero trash, biodiversity, livability–you cannot achieve it without considering landscape solutions. Use SITES to help you design to achieve sustainability. Use the One Planet Principles as your marks and guide to develop activities within our fair share of resources. Use the LAF Landscape Performance Series for precedents and to help you show the value of sustainable scenery solutions to a wide variety of decision-makers and increase your cost to an employer with this approach. There are many ways to practice. Traditional private practice equips an priceless foundation to a profession that takes a lifetime to master, but be open to look at other sectors to practice in as well. Federal agency landscape architects force and significance millions of acres of land, millions of people’s lives, and hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts. Municipal agency planners and designers influence the places we live, wield, remain, and play video games and need your unique training to ensure a robust terrain frame that adapts to climate change, is right and equitable for all, and ensures the state, safety and well-being of all citizens and communities. Environmental non-profit makings have resistance from the backyard to Capitol hill and look for holistic problem-solving and spatial geniu to decode and render formation to policy intuitions, curricula, and projections. Check out idealist.org and look for different berth claims such as “program manager”, “advocate”, “community outreach and engagement”, “analyst”, or “planner”. It may not be design in the traditional sense, but the production may be school and reinforcing for you at this time. When looking at a multi-disciplinary firm, be careful to understand their vision and value for landscape architecture and your persona. Make sure you aren’t the only landscape architect. A multi-disciplinary firm that has landscape architects guiding conceptual design for other trains is a tremendous opportunity. There are a lot residences to practice. Look outside your home sphere. Work abroad. There is more than one channel to do something and until I lived abroad I didn’t truly understand other ways of approaching or solving a problem, or most importantly what culture was. Don’t waste a good receding. Research, voluntary, prevent learning– you can’t know everything you need to know with your stage. Consider earning additional certifications such as ISA certified arborist and EcoDistricts, or accreditations for Sites and Green Roof Professional( GRP ), or assembling structures such as SEED. Talk to other landscape architects and learn lessons from informational interviews even though they are they do not have a job opening now. Ask them about their career route and how they got their job and what the hell is like( and don’t like) about it. Remember you are looking for the right place for you to learn, develop, and lend, and are interviewing them very, and things will get better at some degree and may turnaround speedily so you want to be ready. Take other “off-path” occupations with the understanding that everything is a building block and nothing is wasted. For lesson: Brian Jencek , now Director of Planning at HOK, in this LAF webinar said where reference is graduated during an economic downturn he took a chore working on a loading dock. Throughout the month of May on Fridays at 1pm ET, tune in to LAF’s Instagram Story to hear what LAF Olmsted Scholars who graduated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis did to stay on track. Volunteer on a political campaign. It is important that people who represent our values and priorities as landscape architects are elected to office and “were having” valuable sciences be used to help: parish involvement; knowledge about the environment, transportation, building, and many other issues; and show what its own policy ideas will look like on the dirt. I volunteered on a congressional campaign in between vocations and learned invaluable exercises that assistant me to this day. It was eye-opening and fun. Continue to foster and sustain relationships with your graduating class and other landscape architects. This can be done through ASLA, LAF, TCLF, and other networks. You are part of a larger group of landscape architects and a potent critical mass. We want to learn from you. We are in this together and require you to succeed. You hold us hope. You are our future. Stay in touch and stay connected. And lastly, remember this time is but one speck in the big timeline of life. It’s a messy season, even before the pandemic. But frequently things need to get messy before they get better and change happens. Merely like your design process, it takes numerous iterations to get it right and represented in a simple and easily understandable way. For muse keep the New Landscape Declaration and its precede, the 1966 Declaration of Concern close at hand and go forth with confidence to do whatever you can to help create a new and better future, with our values and priorities contributing the path. With gratitude and best wishes, Barbara Deutsch CEO, Landscape Architecture Foundation

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