Throughout this year, I have been prepared for my career field: architecture. One aspect that is essential to a successful firm is collaboration. The cancer project and group math quizzes grew my collaboration skills. In the cancer project, we created short PSA videos to educate and draw the public to participate in clinical trials. The process of creating these included writing a script, learning about lighting and cameras, and finally, filming. When working at a firm, there are various jobs usually, that are all working on the same floor plan, just different parts of it. In this project, we all had different roles but we had to communicate and work together in order to produce a video. For example, the scriptwriters and the camera people had to meet to match reference shots to specific lines. Each job had a feel for what they wanted based of their knowledge of their specialty. After the camera people took reference shots, we then met with scriptwriters to plan which reference shot would match with each line. By working together the product was perfected. Additionally, after I would complete a job in my area of filming, I would need to get this approved by the director on the camera checklist. This was important because the director had an overall view of the whole process to make sure that our decisions would also match up with the other aspects such as lighting and script-writing. When working at a firm, each job (architect, civil engineer, interior designer, etc.) must approve their specialty on the floor plan to ensure that the “puzzle” will work together. Without approval from that specialty group, the project will fail. This experience helped me to get a taste of this.

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Another project this year that helped me improve in my collaboration skills was math group quizzes. The purpose of working together on a quiz is to ensure that a group is working together (not individually) to answer tough questions and also to make sure that everyone understands the content. This process of working in a group on a quiz forces you to grow your strengths in certain topics and help others in the topics that you struggle with. A lot of times a group will have a variety of strengths which helps us to use each of our best qualities to answer the questions. Specifically on the Probability group quiz, we all excelled in different areas which caused us to use different methods such as tree diagrams vs. two-way tables. Although many of us weren’t the best in the topic of probability, we had smaller strengths within the topic that worked as puzzle pieces to be successful in the end. In many firms, most jobs are not all the same. This is intentional. Each person can have different qualifications and aspects that they excel at. Just like when conquering a group quiz, some students have different strengths in different areas of math; architects have to work with interior designers and engineers to make sure that all of their ideas line up and meet codes. In conclusion, these experiences and processes grew my interest and readiness for the career field of architecture.