Land Matters
How Can Students Take Charge of Their Own Educations?

If you are a student, are you getting what you need from your landscape architecture education? If not, what are you doing about it?

Now, I am sure that most students in landscape architecture programs are pleased with the schooling they’re getting—that’s right, isn’t it? My concern here is with the minority who are not. Over the years, I’ve heard students lament that various parts of their design education were being given short shrift—such as the details of sustainable design (ways of capturing rainfall, for example) or opportunities to actually design and build something in the landscape.

Often, such students come to landscape architecture programs with preexisting interests, such as a passion for plants, that don’t quite jibe with most landscape architecture curricula. These students can turn into seething malcontents if they internalize their frustration, “rogue elephants” if they openly vent it. Nancy Aten, formerly a graduate student at the University of Georgia, found a constructive way to vent hers that might serve as a model for other students. As she tells her story in “Perspective” (page 160), Nancy came to Georgia as a career changer with a strong environmental bent. Then she ran up against “high design” attitudes from a few faculty who gave little more than lip service to environmental responsibility.

So Aten and a group of like-minded students decided to sponsor a sustainability conference as a means of filling in the gap in their schooling. With the backing of the school administration, they raised thousands of dollars in operating funds and invited speakers, including myself, from all over the country. A design charrette rounded out the event, along with informal discussions that included the city mayor. The conference was inspiring on several levels, the most important of which was the fact that the students had taken the initiative to make it happen.

Such student efforts are mostly extracurricular—they carry no credit toward graduation and, in fact, they pull time away from students’ jam-packed class and studio assignments. There are alternatives—for example, taking a semester or a year off to work or travel. Another, more radical, option is to design your own education from scratch like Douglas Hoerr, ASLA (see this month’s “Firm Focus”), who apprenticed himself to a master garden designer in England for a year. The downside of such “busman’s holiday” educations is, of course, that they carry no academic credit and may not help much when applying for jobs. They represent learning for learning’s sake.

Individuals have many learning styles, and independent learning’s not for everyone. What kind of education, formal or informal, has helped you most as a landscape architect? The teachings of a treasured professor or mentor? A life-changing charrette or elective course? An internship? Or something completely outside the formal education system?

The views expressed in this column belong to Bill Thompson, FASLA, editor of Landscape Architecture magazine, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of LAND Online or the American Society of Landscape Architects. Please direct all comments and responses to Thompson at bthompson@asla.org.