<p>Ok, so I'm new to this and I've been trying to find something like this for the longest time.I need your help. So I'm a new mom, I had my son in January 07, and I've wanted to go to college to be an Architect. I graduated from high school in 2006. Well, the building industry is not doing so good this year and I started thinking about the future. Will being an Architect in 10 years from now still be a great career? I had everything planned out since Sophmore year. I wanted to take a year off after I graduated go to a community college and get my requirements out of the way and then apply for the university I wanted to go to. Now I'm having second thoughts, on being an Architect. I have a few other things I'd like to do, and now I can't decide on what I would like to do. How do I figure out I want to do for the rest of my life? Please help! Thank you!</p>
<p>The first thing you should do is set up an appointment with an architect, meet with her or him and learn what daily life is like for an architect. I'm neither a mom nor an architect, but I've raised three youngsters and known plenty of students in architecture school. I can't imagine how anyone could simultaneously manage a toddler and architecture school - that would be an important thing to chat about with an architect. BTW, in adddition to being incredibly intense and rigorous, architecture programs are generally five years in length.</p>
<p>In response to your original question about how to decide - there are few fields anymore in which one can fashion a real career from a bachelor's degree. Architecture may be one, but that's essentially the same as getting a bachelors and masters in other fields. Most true careers will require or be significantly advanced by a masters, so unless you have a particular vocational interest about which you're 100% certain (nursing, teaching, accounting, athletic training, landscaping, etc.), most students will be well served by a liberal arts degree that broadens their horizons and hones their ability to think critically, gather and analyze information, and communicate verbally and in writing. What field to select then becomes simple - whatever you're most passionate about.</p>
<p>I have some experience working for an architecture/engineering firm (what some call a "full service" architecture firm) and I can tell you the competition for a new architect to actually do architectural design work can be very tough. My father, who was in the construction business, occasionally worked with leading national architects and he found that often new architects/architecturestudents would intern with these guys FOR FREE in an attempt to break into the business. In the case of the company I worked for, several degreed architects actually worked on designing the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems and I'll bet that is not uncommon in these larger firms. So, if you are considering the field, it may be wise to consider whether you can be flexible enough to do several types of related work until you get a chance to actually do architectural design.</p>