Story
Liking something and not knowing exactly why
I was born and raised in the Philadelphia area. After high school, my most memorable job was as a mason tender for a historic preservation and renovation contactor. This means I supported skilled brick masons. The work was demanding, but the experience provided the chance to witness an honorable profession - and save money. The crew had strong personalities and were welcoming and funny, once you showed you could hold your own. I enjoyed the camaraderie, but parallel to my daily work, something else inspired me that I could not put my finger on.
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After some years of the day work / night school routine, I became an example of one of New Jersey's leading exports - people - and left the Garden State to attend Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. I pursued this particular school in part because I wanted to go somewhere from which I couldn't quickly drive home. The other reason was their unique joint aerospace and ocean engineering program.
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After a year of engineering courses, I was disillusioned. Instead of static, dynamics and calculus, the courses I enjoyed more were economics, sociology, psychology and public policy and development.
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Late in my second year at Tech, while shifting over to more of a broad liberal arts education, I was told by the registrar's office that students eventually had to declare a major in something. With that nudge, I engaged the career counseling center and received what was to be prescient insights about the future, in the form of guidance from an empathetic counselor. I told him I had been fascinated since childhood by stories I read in magazines like "Science Digest," "Discover," and "Omni" - stories of lunar colonies and undersea habitats that the authors promised were just around the corner. I wanted a hand in building them. The counselor thought about that for several minutes and then said something I will never forget: "Those are interesting goals, Tim, but I must say, you will most likely never, in your professional lifetime, design or build such things."
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His words were deflating, but like I wrote, I would come to see them as prophetic. He asked what it was about these habitats that intrigued me. I explained. He thought some more. After a full minute's pause, he said:
"Tim, what you are truly interested in is not how these structures and habitats operate physically, or how they keep people alive, keep the air in, keep water out, per se. What intrigues you most is how people interact with their built environments." He pointed his finger in the general direction of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies (CAUS) building and said I should talk to people there. My life was about to change...
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The word that best explains how I felt after that visit: epiphany. Working in residential and commercial construction in center-city Philly was tough. It was either too hot, too cold, too humid, too dry or too wet. But my visit to CAUS finally made me see why I enjoyed that job (which I still did every academic break): it was the opportunities it gave me to observe a working city and how its systems and subsystems operated for, or against, people. This is what I did between brick runs, mixing 'mud,' building scaffolding, driving trucks and retrieving materials, joking with the crew and eating Philly soft pretzels for lunch. In Philadelphia, as a contractor's assistant, I was subconsciously studying people and "how they interacted with their built environments." Those impressions stuck with me subconsciously until that visit to CAUS when I saw that Urban Affairs & Planning perfectly matched my interests.
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The next years were essentially an immersion in the Socratic Method. Inside VT's vaunted engineering school, classes held upwards of 300 students sitting theater-style, often quietly listening to the professor or teaching assistant. There was little chance to interact. Most avoided raising their hands for fear of saying something naive or incorrect in front of a large crowd.
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Contrast that to a typical CAUS class named "Spatial Analysis and Urban Systems." There were 6 students. You could not 'not' do your reading. There was nowhere to hide. You had to interact, argue and defend your views.
This continued until, alongside 12 fellow CAUS seniors, I graduated. The commencement ceremony was at Lane Stadium, VT's football venue. When the announcer got to us, the cheers of we twelve were passionate, but paled in comparison to the some 3,000 graduates from the College of Engineering that year.
Completing my BA was a meaningful accomplishment that happened to leave me with two more years on my US Army National Guard service commitment. I enjoyed my duty and my unit, so I applied to grad school at VT and was accepted. This was an easy choice because: 1) CAUS’ Masters in Urban Affairs (MUA) program was ranked 4th nationally that year; 2) leaving VT would would require a complex army transfer, and; 3) I was offered a scholarship.
The MUA required 48 credits and a thesis. With a focus on economics and development, my practicum reported on our geopolitical/geographic shift in international relations that began near the end of the Cold War. I met the requirements and became one of 8 MUA recipients that year.
My post-secondary education was done and the work to establish my career began...