Hello and welcome to this episode. In the episode where I shared about how I picked up different jobs to help me make some allowance to fund my education. Right after I graduated from my degree, there was no escaping work in an architecture firm. In order to be qualified to sit for the professional exam in the future, if I choose to be one, I would need to complete an internship of a minimum duration of ten months. Of course to prevent people from job-hopping, the criteria set out for us then was that we had to spend a minimum tenure of five months in a firm as an intern in order to count towards our internship experience. And only upon satisfying the ten-month long internship then we meet the requisition to take up postgraduate architecture course.There are so many architecture firms big and small in Singapore. Where do I start from? I was feeling a little lost. But I had a good friend who was always very in touch with the local architecture scene. So he shared that he would go for a medium size firm that was up and coming, showed me some photos featuring their work in a magazine. The rationale was simple: if the firm is too small, the projects may likely be limited in scale and variety. Resources will be tighter and we may not see very much beyond the handful of small projects. We may also be expected to do a lot of hands-on work ourselves than we can bargain for as interns. If the firm is too large, we may only get to see or work on a very small part of a huge project and end up missing the big picture. The medium size firm will have some sort of structure and organisation of a firm while still seeing some reasonable scale and variety of project types.For lack of a better idea, I joined my friend in writing to apply for work as an intern for the medium size firm he introduced. We brought our school projects portfolio to the interview. It was very different from my previous little meet-ups with recruiters for my holiday temporary jobs, where I never knew who I would be working for or what company I was hired to work in until I turned up for work that day. This was really my first time at a formal interview speaking directly to my potential new boss and going through what I could do by showing my school project works, sharing whether I preferred to do design work or perhaps oversee site construction progress and for them to consider if I could be a good fit for the company.To my surprise, the architecture firm accepted both my friend and myself. So we started work.Through this experience, I learned it is important to identify the type of company you want to work in or switch to. I asked myself if I wanted to learn to do things hands-on and be intimately familiar with the trades of the industry. Or do I want to start with a broader perspective of how things are put together. It is important to be clear and begin with the end in mind as one considers prospective employers to work for.Because of our different zone of genius, my friend and I were placed in two different teams. My friend has a greater flair for design and creating aesthetically appealing graphics and was thus placed in a team that had more design work, pitching for projects for resorts in far-flung destinations like Maldives, dreaming up how holiday-makers would experience cuisine, immerse themselves in different experiences. Even the thought of being given a chance to work on an overseas resort as an intern sounded so sexy, in destinations at that point in time of our life we can only dream of. On the other hand, I was more of a person who could collaborate with people to get work done. I was able to try to connect to different personalities and people from different background, so I was tasked with overseeing construction of houses at site, in-charge of keeping an eye to create a place where people can call home. I liked going to sites, solving details to make them work when things on a two-dimensional drawing simply cannot inform the tradesmen on how to make it work in reality. We would detail out through discussions and move things along. I had to figure out between all the drawings that do not tally what was the real intention of the look that the design wanted to achieve. Sometimes I may have to go back ot office to consult the original designer what was it they want to achieve in terms of look and I do my best to preserve and stay faithful to the design. There was a sense of accomplishment to see things on paper leap into a space that a person can walk through.On occasions, I do get pulled in to pull some overnighters to chip in for job pitches. It was tiring because in the daytime I would be out and about under the sun and walking around the site to look at work progress, to brainstorm and solve issues. Coming back in the later afternoon I had to do the paperworks for the contract administrative part of my work. So when job pitches come in, all hands on deck are busy and paperwork has to still carry on. This is when I would really ...
