Get Practiced

Most of us need to find a job after finishing architecture school. Get Practiced is a guide for getting the first five years of your career underway. Whether a student or a recent graduate, you have the skills and training you need. Why settle for the first job you can get? Through practical exercises and first hand accounts, Get Practiced provides you the information you need to create your own professional-development plan, as well as ensure that you can execute it.

Although it's impossible to predict exactly how your career will turn out, it's entirely possible to shape and craft it. This book explains how to become a productive and successful professional even before you have graduated. For those interested in making a change from your current job or gaining a specialty, Get Practiced offers interviews, case studies, and examples that illustrate the importance of focusing your professional objectives, building networks, and how to generate tangible evidence that effectively transmits your abilities. You will use your skills as a learned to become a producer.

Exercises include
- Make a list of your benchmarks
- Apply to one non-job related post
- Interview a mentor
- Write your own studio brief
- Conduct a 48-hour charrette project with some friends

Get Practiced sections examine all scales of formative design production:
- The US-based firm with four partners from Columbia, Egypt, Canada, and the US who are conducting curatorial projects in Boston, large-scale urban design projects in the Middle East, and building houses in Guatemala
- The German/American industrial design partnership in London, who recently completed an artist-in-residence at the the Victoria and Albert Museum
- The Portuguese architect and writer who is now the curator of Contemporay Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art
- The Connecticut architect and businessman who moved from New York City to head Bruce Mau Design in Toronto
- The two American grad students who started building a hospital in Rwanda while in their second year of school