<p>Sashimi, there is no doubt that NY is a tough place. I started out of school in Atlanta at TVS, a really good place to get experience. I was making $10,000 a year, but I shared an apartment in a transitional neighborhood for $125 a month. My only furniture consisted of a bed and a B&W 13" TV. But I could afford an $800 canoe and spent any weekends that I wasn’t working, canoeing in the mountains of Georgia. I met my wife there, and we always assumed we would be poor but happy architects.</p>
<p>Five years later I graduated from Columbia where I went back for my graduate degree (mid 80’s). At this point I started making $27,000 a year at KPF and my wife was making the same at another big design firm. With our combined incomes we managed to find a 600 s.f. studio and did OK financially. However I watched NY devour many of my single classmates. They shared a crappy apartment that consumed almost all of their income (or what was left after all the taxes), and spent most of their waking hours in the office putting in crazy amounts of overtime. Unlike Atlanta, being poor in NY was not such a noble thing. Most of my classmates went to work in the city after graduation, but within two years 75% of them were gone. Even at $10,000 a year, life in Atlanta had been a lot easier.</p>
<p>I keep in touch with my former peers at KPF, and the starting salaries at KPF are the same as what we pay in Dallas, but the difference in the cost of living is staggering. Young graduates in our office seem to live reasonable lives, get married, have kids and get to spend time with them. If you really crave the NY experience (and I did), just make sure you work for one of the top firms (KPF, SOM, Polshek, Vignoli etc.), the kind of experience you can’t get elsewhere. If you work for an HOK or Gensler, you may as well live in a place like Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, or Denver. The experience will be the same.</p>
<p>I want to thank everyone who was a part of this conversation. I happen to be a freshman in college myself and am struggling with what I want to pursue. I am currently a business and marketing major. I am interested in business, however from a young age, I have always wanted to pursue architecture. I am very spatially oriented and have always enjoyed designing things. The past month or so I have wrestled with whether I want to continue on the path to a business degree or switch. The only issue is that my current school does not offer any form of architecture which means transferring. I am nervous with what that means I must do if I choose architecture. This discussion however, has answered almost exactly the same questions I have. Thanks for unknowingly asking and answering my questions.</p>
<p>To dragonreborn:
Hi, I’m almost in the exact same situation now as you were when you first made this post. I’m also a sophomore in college and I’m currently a pre-med major. I’m currently in an intro to architecture course and I absolutely love it. It’s actually a funny story as when I first applied to college I applied to the school of architecture here at the University of Texas. I had always loved the concept of architecture ever since I was a child and I knew it was what I wanted to do. Unfortunately I wasn’t accepted and I took it pretty hard and thought “maybe I wasn’t meant to be an architect.” I ended up changing my major to follow the pre-med path here at UT but I’ve started to realize that my heart is going back to architecture. I’m seriously considering switching my major to architecture but I was just wondering, (dragonreborn) What did you end up choosing to do? Did you end up following architecture?</p>