By Felicia Reyes, Assoc. AIA, Associate’s Director Curtis Frank, AIA, EP Director
The Emerging Professional (EP) committee and membership had a busy year filled with events focused on bringing our EP community back together again to reinforce our engagement with each other and our industry. The success of each event is due in large part to each member’s participation and commitment.
As the year began, we knew we had a large task ahead to bring us from virtual engagement back to an in-person experience with some hybrid opportunities. Working remotely afforded us all higher levels of flexibility, but participation at EP events and committee meetings was struggling. Our hope was to bring interactions back to our dynamic that cannot be achieved in a virtual world. With this approach in mind, the EP programming this year was curated to allow an avenue for young professionals to network with peers, more experienced AIA members, and our Sacramento community as a whole.
Our programming included monthly EP meetings held on the 1st Wednesday of every month, 3 AXP Tours, 6 meet-ups for our Social Crawl Series, ARE Prep study sessions, the annual “So You Want to be an Architect” panel, and the Celebration of the Profession event to celebrate the newly licensed architects in our region. Each event was designed to further our training and bring us back together as leaders of our industry. We thrive in our field when we are able to share ideas and foster relationships with our peers. We also started the process to update the Ambassador Program developed by Jennifer Harris. This program connects us to an EP in member and non-member firms.
We had many fantastic events this year, but one of our standouts was the every-other-month Social Crawl Series ” happy hour” held at 6 local breweries and tap houses. Each Social was casual, allowing us to engage in-person again and connect beyond the computer screen. We had 3 themed socials of the series which focused on Mentor/ Mentee Meet-Up plus a bring your pup opportunity, a Past-President mingle, and the most successful social crawl event was the Inter-Association Mixer with over 50 EPs in attendance. This mixer was in partnership with SRBX NEXT, AIACV Emerging Professionals, and SEAOCC Young Members Forum. You may be asking. Was it a successful series overall? The social crawl series was successful in fostering a casual environment for us to network and even drew emerging professionals from outside the AIA community to a number of the socials. However, we did see the challenge that so many event leaders are currently facing where we are not drawing in the number of individuals we were used to at events. Our hope is that as we continue to provide content focused on our education and connection that we will see our participation increase in order to take our in-person engagement to the next level. Thank you to all that were able to attend for great conversations and a fun opportunity to visit various locations around the city.
We would like to send a special thank you to ALL of our event leaders this year. In particular, we would like to thank Madeline Villena with Dewberry and Andrew Marks with Hausman Architecture for leading the planning and coordination of our AXP Tour series—as well as the two firms who opened their projects to us. These tours are a way to inspire EPs working on their required field observation hours to achieve onsite construction experience. To make the tours a success it requires the leaders and firms who donate their time, and the participants that attend each event. Their hard work this year allowed us to visit the Richards Boulevard Office Complex (RBOC) by Dreyfuss + Blackford & ZGF and have two tours at the Elk Grove High School by Lionakis each showing the projects at various levels of construction to further exposure with the in the field experience.
We had a wonderful year back to in-person events, seeing many faces we have missed over the last couple of years, and hope to see more new faces as we continue to grow in the new year. Although we had many successes this year we do continue to ask, how do we get members to re-engage with our EP events? Every event requires two basic components to create a recipe for success, new and continuing event leaders and participation from each member of our architectural community.
As your EP Director and Associate Director we are here for you and encourage you to reach out with ideas and for opportunities to lead an event. We will be welcoming Elizabeth Hawks McBride, AIA from Nacht & Lewis as our incoming EP Director for 2023. Thank you to our outgoing EP Director, Curtis Frank, AIA with Hausman Architecture, for your stewardship over the last two years and commitment to our architectural community. We are having a transitional meeting to outline the events for the next year soon and would love your feedback and new ideas. Thank you all and see you next year!
Learn more about the Emerging Professionals committee and how to get involved here!