Tag: student

Looking Forward: Mentality Magazine

Lucy Freeman Leave a comment

Happy Saturday!

We are rapidly approaching the end of the semester which means I only have a couple of posts left. This week I’m posting a day late because my organization, MUSIC Matters, held our biggest event of the year. If you attended SpringFest day festival or the night concert featuring Hippo Campus – I just want to say thank you. We all appreciate it so much and hope that you enjoyed it. 

Moving on, this week we are talking about Mentality Magazine! I had the opportunity to speak to Liz Hoornstra, the current editor-in-chief of the publication. She explained that the magazine aims to do two main things: 1. Create a sense of community for its members and 2. Destigmatize mental health through writing. As someone who has been focusing on taking control of my mental health for the past year, I was really excited to learn more about how the magazine has done this and how others can support their mission!

Mentality Magazine typically publishes digital issues, with a printed copy done once a semester. This semester marks an exciting milestone for the organization: 10 printed publications (and 5 years of being an org on campus!). Some of the topics they’ve been focusing on most recently deals with the impact that the pandemic and racial injustice towards the BIPOC and AAPI communities have had on peoples’ mental health. This follows in their larger commitment to diversifying the magazine’s staff and writing focuses, including highlighting marginalized voices in mental health discussions. I was excited to hear that they’re taking on these topics so directly, as they have affected us all in different ways over the past year and are, in many ways, directly tied to some of the most widespread mental struggles on campus. 

Mentality Magazine has also recently partnered with steps wellness, “the mental wellness platform for college students”. The platform helps connect students to licensed therapists, provides safe, private spaces for them to have therapy sessions in person or through video call, and allows them to share and read about their peers’ experiences with mental health. This is something that I found incredibly important. Especially in college living situations with many roommates and with most therapy sessions being virtual right now, it can be hard to find a space where you can talk about your struggles without worrying if others will overhear or barge in. This partnership shows that Mentality Magazine is really committed to helping students at every level of their mental wellness journey.

Liz also explained to me that COVID has sparked some important conversations regarding mental health equity and accessibility, things that people were sometimes skittish to talk about before.

“We welcome any and all members to Mentality, but we also are very open that mental health is not a topic that you can be apolitical about and we have to recognize that, holding a space in the mental health community here at Michigan means that there are certain times when we cannot stay silent. I hope that going forward, that is something that we are prioritizing.”

If you’re interested in getting involved in Mentality Magazine, you are welcome to join at any point! They look for writers all through the year, so you don’t have to join at the beginning of the year or semester. You can visit mentalitymagazine.org and fill out the contact form and a member of their exec team will get back to you about the next steps. If you don’t have enough time to be a writer, or that’s not your personal skill set, you can still do other things to help support the magazine and its important mission on campus! Reading and sharing articles is so important – de-stigmatization can’t happen without conversation. 

That’s all from me this week! Thank you so much for reading and I will be back next week with my last post of the semester featuring a capella group 58 Greene!

Stay safe & stay well,

Lucy

Did you really want to be an architect when you were a kid?

themichiganarchitect 2 Comments
Taubman Wing of Arts&Architecture Bldg

Hi Everyone!
I’m back again, this week, to share some of my experiences as an architecture student here, at the University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning!

This week, the topic is introductions.

Yes, introductions…. like, Hi, my name is ____, I major in ____, how about you?

Ever since I started college here, I’d always say that line above, with “architecture” in place of the blank, and I’ve always gotten responses like OMG wow that’s SO cool! Is there a lot of math involved? or Wow that’s so cool, I remember when I was a kid, I thought architecture was so cool, and I used to want to become an architect too! And when I say always, I mean ALWAYS! I ALWAYS get such replies!

Ok, I get it, some people just say that since it’s a standard thing to say to express courteous interest in getting to know someone and their passion. But COME ON! I’ve gotten those responses, from mostly non-design majors, from at least A HUNDRED people now. To be fair, that’s a pretty small number in comparison to the total number of humans at Michigan. BUT, in architecture, which I find to be a very selective, niche field, that’s a huge number. I mean, maybe I just lived in a very sheltered environment as a child, but growing up, I was maybe aware of buildings, but I was probably only aware of architecture as  a  serious discipline by high school. There’s barely any architects in the world, in comparison to the number of people working in the other disciplines, so to me, when many people express that they “used to” want to be an architect, it’s kind of like the equivalent of saying “I used to like that flavor of soda.”

And then, the conversation would usually carry on to people asking me what kinds of classes I have to take (ahem, is math one of them?), where are my classes located, is it in LSA, if I enjoy them, and if they can see some of my work (which I’m happy to share with you!!).

So, as a first year (undergraduate), you will be taking mostly prerequisite classes, just like students of other majors, a “basic” drawing class (quotation marks because it was NOT basic to me, it was straight-up still-life drawing freehand, and some training to use design tools and training our eyes to recognize angles, and having a steady hand to draw straight lines without a T-square or erasure), along with a first year architectural seminar that started introducing some design terminology and attempted to teach us a first-pass way at reading building plans.

The second year, you may need to take a few more prerequisite courses, but you will be getting into some more introductory architectural courses, including introducing drafting (like scaled drawings) which naturally leads to first-pass at creating physical models in attempts to demonstrate specified concepts, and working with modeling materials and learning modeling techniques fit for ourselves. The semester after that, you’ll get introduced to virtual modeling software programs mainly Rhinoceros, along with the Adobe Creative Suite (mainly Photoshop and Illustrator), which leads right into learning how to use software along with our prior drafting knowledge to best represent our projects and their concepts.

Then comes the third year, where you’ll FINALLY get into a real studio- this is what people will usually refer to it as the weeder course of architecture, since you really put all of those design techniques and knowledge to use, and the curriculum of studio continues to pick up the pace, since you’re already expected to have learned and mostly mastered the skills you’ve picked up from the previous courses. I personally found the weeder course (it’s called UG1 and stands for undergraduate studio #1) intense, a ton of work, yet very rewarding, since I’d been itching to build models since my first day of freshman year! I’d also say that it really depends on who you get matched with for your instructor. I was lucky to have a really amazing instructor, Melissa Harris, who really helped me find my voice in representing architecture and what I liked or did not like to do, for my own modeling and representation methods. I definitely practically lived in my studio desk, I did my projects day-in, day-out, it was the center of my classes at the time. I’d get my other course work as quickly done as I could, as to make as much time as possible for studio. Of course, it was also my first time in such a setting, still learning what works and what doesn’t work for me.

But yes, time management has gotten better for me over time, and I am currently surviving my studio, and actually kind of enjoying my classes for once, since as a fourth year, you are required to take architecture electives along with a structures course (which is more like an applied-physics course), which I find I am really enjoying more than I expected! And if you’re a math-y student, you’re in luck, because you cannot ever fully escape physics or math, or even reading and writing for that matter. (Believe me, I’ve tried.)

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So I’m curious, how many of you, (be honest please) have caught yourself responding in such a way when being introduced to a design student? And how many of you actually literally meant it? And if you did, what was your exposure to architecture like from your childhood, and what affected your collage career decisions in such a way that steered you away from architecture, or just any design-related field in general?

And if you’re a fellow architecture student, or another design major, or prospective student, let me know your thoughts! I’d love to hear your thoughts! Follow me on instagram @themichiganarchitect ! I’d love to see your work as well! :0

Thank you!

Stay tuned for more architecture with me next week! 🙂

In The Eyes of an Architecture Student: An Intro

themichiganarchitect Leave a comment

As an architecture student, I often get questions on what that’s like, or people just looking at me differently because I am in such a different discipline than them.

Well, to answer that question, I’ve always felt that it is natural for me and my classmates to gravitate towards similar visual interests, and see the world in different perspectives than people of other disciplines.

The image above is a meme I found online, that perfectly sums up what exactly this looks like, and what it feels like when I step back to see the big picture, when I amuse myself, thinking back to the feedback sessions during class and how it must look to outsiders with their first architecture school exposure, or a conversation with a non-architecture friend about my projects who are genuinely interested in understanding my ideas, but sometimes just need a bit more rephrasing or adjusting their thoughts so they are able to comprehend what exactly I am talking about.

Literally, the other day in class, we were discussing the significance of a picture of a glass of water resting on a clean, wooden table. I caught myself, making detailed observations or odd questions, like, the water depicted is so clean, further reinforcing the photographer’s purpose to demonstrate the cleanliness of the facility that produced that water. Or, the glass has only been filled with x amount of water, could it be a symbolic representation of the photographer’s ideological bias?

Others would likely see this as me being an over-thinker, or just some strange girl who has an interest in finding beauty or extra, made-up meaning in mundane objects, but I think this sort of logic of thinking is quite typical of architectural education, for instance, when instructors are having a conversation with us, about a designer’s intentions, or when we are asked to interpret someone else’s work, and we try to relate to their design, making it a valuable experience which is able to contribute to our own future design-work.

I definitely find myself more in-sync with my abstract interests whenever I photograph. I’d just visit a place, or an object, look at it from different points of view, then capture the images through my camera lenses, and it’s only afterwards, when I’m looking back at the images, that I realize these must look like such random shots to someone else, or sometimes even I question why I first found that view so intriguing, or how I even got the idea to shoot in such a perspective.

I have many other experiences to discuss, but I won’t write your eyes out, so I’ll discuss more in the following weeks, so stay tuned 🙂

And if you want to checkout my abstract photography, follow me on Instagram @themichiganarchitect !