You’ve studied really hard, haven’t you? You’ve spent months staying up till 5 and 6 AM in the morning, giving all those parties your friends have been frequenting a miss. You’ve worked tirelessly throughout university life to make yourself that kickass portfolio. From internships to exams, to research, to sincerity and sweat, you have done it all. It’s graduation day. Your name is called out. Dressed in a robe and graduation hat, you head over to the stage, accept your degree and walk off right into the mandatory graduation photograph and toss your hat in the air. B.Arch or M.Arch - that’s your identity now, isn’t it? School’s out. As we delve into the struggle faced by any architecture student to find a job, we aim to address and discuss some common problems and how we are the solution.
How does an Architecture Student find a job -
1. The Sisyphean Struggle
2. For, by, and with the students - What ArchSlate offers
1. The Sisyphean Struggle
You need a job. Desperately. You’ve signed up on all the possible job portals you can think of, surfing through the adverts throughout the day. Refreshing your email, time and again, to check on replies is now equivalent to brushing your teeth, an involuntary action you do every day as a ritual. You’re searching, scavenging for that one opening into the industry. Recruiters advertise jobs that require 3+, 5+ and sometimes 10+ years of work experience. "Sorry I wasn’t born 30 years earlier than I was to gain the relevant work experience I need in order to be eligible to even apply for employment," is the only thought that crosses most minds. If you’re a student or a fresh graduate, finding jobs that you fit the criteria for is extremely hard. While looking for a job is merely the first step, keeping track of the multitude of jobs you’ve applied for is another long and strenuous process altogether. Finding unconventional job opportunities such as externships, freelance projects, mentorships and more is a tedious prolonged process.
2. What Archslate offers you
The pandemic has changed the course of hiring. It has taken away from the students an opportunity to intern through the duration of their course as well as snatched away and shattered the dreams of millions of students to work at their dream company. Employers too could not take advantage of the graduating talent of 2020 as budgets were reduced, costs were cut and people were laid off as the world came to a standstill. Travel bans were imposed and migrating from one part of the country to another merely for a job or an interview became nothing short of a risky decision one was not willing to take.
Our employment board tool takes into consideration problems that have existed prior to the pandemic as well as during the pandemic to bridge the gap between the process of hiring and ease of access to opportunities. Archslate directly connects the employer to a talent pool of students from colleges such as Harvard and MIT as well as community colleges, hence providing a platform for equal opportunity across different economic and intelligence strata. While bigger firms may have a preference, to hire grads from IVY league universities, Archslate recognizes this and hence also has smaller firms on the platform run by ethnic, gender, and racial minorities, to provide that chance to a student who might be a community college grad, who merely loses an opportunity for employment due to the lack of access to it in the first place.
A move we’ve made in favor of students, as a result of the pandemic and loss of work openings is that in 2020, we as a platform lobbied for architecture firms, design firms, career service departments amongst others to facilitate unorthodox job opportunities for students for them to benefit, grow and learn to add to their careers and future prospects in some way. We joined hands with the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) to help find remote internships, hourly work, and other non-traditional jobs to help students stay afloat through these trying times.
We as a platform believe in tapping untapped talent. Very often generic job boards uplift the already uplifted. For instance, due to the pandemic, a lot of experienced people got laid off opening up various opportunities at senior positions in many different firms. These jobs were advertised as senior roles on the job boards, intimidating potential candidates resulting in them ruling out the possibility of even trying to bag the role. Archslate on the other hand ensures that it's got a little something for everybody. Our founder Vaishnavi, a Harvard grad herself, experienced the struggle first-hand, as a student. Having gone through the experience personally and having seen her friends go through a ghastly and unsettling process of finding an internship or job and finally getting settled, she decided to bridge the gap that existed between employers and job-seekers in order to enable the right kind of networking. Archslate believes in the industry growing as a whole and for the industry to grow, expand and innovate, fresh perspectives from students with varied interests (sustainable architecture, minimalist architecture, etc) have to be recruited.
“Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together”
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
In our case we stand by two bricks - the right employer and the right talent, be it a student or an experienced professional. We work hard, day in and day out, to empower students and stand with, by, and for them, for students of the past are leaders of the future.
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Built by Architects for the Architecture, Landscape, Interior, and Urban planning industry, Archslate is proud to create the largest talent marketplace that understands the needs of every firm while removing recruiters, third-party agencies, and percentage cuts. See how Archslate can help your firm by requesting a demo with us.
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