The end of August always marks the time of year where students of all ages begin going back to school. If you are going into your first year of architecture school I wish you luck! For some it will be a shock while others may have gotten the heads up on the life of an architecture student. One of the hidden lessons you’ll learn in architecture school is balance.
Balance in architecture school is all about time management, your goals, and your health. You will need to learn to balance these three main categories to get through architecture school. Studio/school, life, and sleep. If you put a little more time towards one you must take time away from another. Sadly, each day only has 24 hours and you must decide what you want to accomplish in those 24 hours.
I call out studio in particular with school because studio will be the guide for your schedule. It will be the course that requires most of your time, where you will spend most of your time, and the class you will have no idea how you are doing until to receive your final grade. Balancing studio and other school work alone can be a challenge. It would be advantageous of you to understand what actually needs to be done in your other courses. If going to every history class means you don’t need to read chapters later I would recommend not miss a class. It is impossible to get everything done that all your professors require of you in a week’s time, so you must set priorities on what HAS to be done versus what is for your extra benefit. Don’t send your time making a gorgeous final model until you know it is the final model because if it’s not the final, odds are your studio professor will completely destroy it the next day. And don’t get into the studio trap of constantly doing iterations. Learn to make decisions on your own and try taking your iterations farther. It is easy to get caught in an endless loop of possible iterations because it is endless; however, you have to remember you must also balance life and sleep. Which one are you will you lose out?
Life is a whole spectrum of things including friends, sports of any kind, cooking, going to the doctor/dentist/etc, and simply enjoying college life. It is very easy for a stomach bug or a cold to go around studio with the late nights and people choosing to take time out of the life and sleep categories. Please take care of yourself in college! It’s about taking the time to eat a healthy meal, get outside, hang out with your friends outside of architecture, go to the gym, or anything else that can give you a break from constant studio.
Last but one of the most important is sleep! Most architecture students will take time out of this category so that they still have time for studio/school and having a life. I will admit between late nights in studio and early morning classes, a good amount of my undergrad I was only getting 5 maybe 6 hours of sleep a night. Looking back I really don’t know how I did it besides maybe a lot more coffee. By the time I got to my senior year and into graduate school I was tired of the lack of sleep. I began treating these three categories like a job. You wake up get to class/studio, get through your day, made myself take a dinner break, and then either go back to studio or stay home and work on other assignments that didn’t require going to studio. This mindset really helped me to gain sleep and be able to recharge myself. So do not under estimate the value of the sleep category.
It’s all about finding the balance that works for you, and trying to keep that balance when you get your first job. I ended up preferring the work style approach which helped getting into the real world. Others work better not getting into studio until noon and working in the evenings. There are a ton of different approaches to tackling architecture school. The sooner you can able to find that balance between studio/school, life, and sleep the better of you are. And there is not perfect formula that works all the time. Sometimes you need to make sacrifices in other categories like during final production for studio most individuals will focus on just studio and minimal amount of sleep.
Good luck on the new school year and finding the balance that works for you.