NYC

Externship

Many have asked why it's called an externship. It's a program run by UVa to help let students get a foot in the door of firms who might otherwise not be interested. It's only a week long (logistically unintimidating for firms and students who need to find accomodations in cities), and it's unpaid. Firms are generally pretty willing to take on students for this program especially because the school makes the phone calls for them.

I was fortunate to have an externship at NBBJ's NYC branch. It's a firm with branches in many major cities across the world. The projects I worked on for the week were based in Asia, and I got to work in metric!!! Awesome sauce, it's so much better than American Architectural. This may sound funny, but everyone surprised me by actually taking time to introduce themselves, talk to me, and make me feel welcome. I figured they'd be more uptight and cutthroat because it's NYC and they're international, but part of this particular firm's philosophy harmonizes nicely with UVa's desire to achieve collaboration. Anyways, they had me doing research and build a model, and I kept busy during my short sejour there.

Friends

Three of my good high school friends, friends from Bike and Build, friends known through parents, and Bernard's family are all around the area, which makes it pretty easy to feel at home here in the city. I've had dinner with most of them so far, either during the week after work or on the weekend. I guess social networks are an important consideration when moving to a new city.

MoMA P.S.1 - Rising Currents

Part of the great thing about NYC is there's always something going on. I'm a fan of art at big scales, and MoMA provides just that (although some people at work would argue they've turned to blockbuster exhibits rather than ones of quality). Robin (high school friend), Jake (Bike and Build), Topher (Jake's friend), and I checked out the Rising Currents studio opening at P.S.1 yesterday. Guy Nordenson and Catherine Seavitt, both of whom had been reviewing our projects for us at UVa for Fall semester, had arranged this exhibit. They invited many people to participate in living at P.S.1 and designing solutions to the problem of rising water levels submerging NYC. The people who had designed the exhibits were there, and it was great being able to discuss their solutions with them and ask questions about what they thought, where they were inspired from. One woman was recently graduated from UPenn, and she admired Beth Meyer at UVa - so I'm super excited to be taking her landscape architectural theory class next semester. Anyways, we saw the rest of the museum afterwards. It's a converted public school building (hence the name, "P.S."), so it had great wood floors and exposed brick walls. Perhaps not the most thermally efficient, but very nice spaces to display art.

Public Transportation - Walking

At Charlottesville, between my apartment and school, there exists one bus, the #7 that runs every 15 minutes between 6am - 7pm, and every 30 minutes from 7pm - 10:50pm. It is frequently late. In contrast, New York City has allowed me to try a different route to work almost every day that I've been here. I don't wait much longer than 5 minutes for the next subway. Why do I mention walking? The pedestrian crosswalks in Charlottesville are so awfully designed - around cars in fact. You often have to press a button to get a walk signal at all. Oftentimes, so many roads converge that it takes quite a while for your particular signal to show up. And New Yorkers J-walk all the time. It's great, haha.

Conclusion

Whenever discussing what cities we'd like to settle down in after school at UVa, I would usually mention New York City as a potential. Generally, people would scoff. Some who worked there before would shake their heads at living in Manhattan, others would say it's too much for me, etc. etc. What I think though, is that originally, I'm in fact from Seoul, which is more hectic, more dense, and more built up than NYC. I got along swimmingly while I was at Seoul, and New York in many ways feels more comfortable to me than Charlottesville ever will.