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ACE Mentors Prepare for the Future | |||||||||||
by Thomas J. Storrs, AIA, and F. Hamilton O'Dunne, AIA |
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Charles H. Thornton, of Thornton-Tomasetti Engineers, one of the cofounders, got HNTB and a number of other firms here interested in forming a chapter in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago. He called saying we had to get involved with this fantastic program to draw bright high school students into the building professions. The two of us decided to participate as a team to make the time commitment more practical. We've also involved other younger architects here in the office.
We developed a nine-month curriculum, the same schedule as the school year, and each week we do something different. We tried to come up with a program that was indicative of what our professional day is like, whether it was looking at six different projects in the two-hour weekly session or showing a time-lapse design-construction video. We tried to give them a realistic taste of being an architect. The presentations move around among different offices. We had a lot of the sessions here in our office because we are close to mass transit and it was convenient for the kids. We would also take them to the structural and mechanical engineers' offices as well as actual construction sites. Get involved There is, of course, a commitment of time. It isn't huge, probably three to four hours a week. It's true that in our busy schedules that can be a lot of time, but you just make a commitment and do it. One of the more interesting aspects of participating in the ACE program is that you have fun. You're giving young people a flavor of the whole process of design and construction. You're not trying to teach them to be architects in nine months, naturally, just giving them an understanding and appreciation of why we find our jobs interesting. So you can have some fun. And the kids have fun learning about buildings and how they are built. At the beginning we saw some of the students with muted interest at best. And by the end of the nine months, these kids are really into it. The challenges
We expected that the scholarships would be an incentive. They are $2,000 or $3,000 and awarded at the end of the year to the most worthy students. The Washington, D.C., ACE chapter was able to give five students scholarship funds last May. Sometimes, though, we were surprised that the students didn't vie more vigorously for that scholarship money. The rewards In our experience, we've already seen success stories where kids got into university architecture programs. In one case, a young man and his younger brother both got scholarships through our ACE chapter. One is going to the Catholic University of America and the other to the University of Maryland. The side benefits And even after having been in this business for 20-plus years, both of us have learned things during these seminars. When we bring our engineers in to give conceptual overviews on mechanical systems or structures, we actually learn some things too. Because the curriculum we develop is broad-based through the industry, you get good cross-communication among architects, engineers, and constructors. And from that you get fresh insight. Copyright 2002 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved. |
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