by, Elizabeth Hawks McBride, AIA, Emerging Professionals Director
This year’s EP Committee events have been kicked off and it has been so much fun getting together already. Together with my co-chair Felicia Reyes of ArchNexus, we have planned lots of activities for the rest of this year to look forward to. At every one of these events this year, we encourage everyone to bring a friend! It can be intimidating to go to events if you don’t know anyone so if you know anyone who might be interested in our activities, bring them along to check it out.
Currently we have launched the EP Design Competition. This year’s competition is in partnership with Three Sisters Gardens for a new 4 story muti-use community center to act as their foundation headquarters as well as to provide community services and distribution of locally grown fruits and vegetables from their gardens. The submissions are due May 30th and entries can be from individuals or groups of up to 5 people. At least 1 person needs to be an EP AIA member per team.
Regular committee meetings are occurring Quarterly this year at 4:00pm and are held at local firms with a short social afterwards with some of the office staff. We will also be ending each meeting with a discussion topic based on what is important to EPs today. Our first meeting of the year we discussed ARE exam prep and shared tips and resources. Our next meeting is May 3 at ArchNexus. Anyone interested in our events is welcome to attend these meetings. You will hear more about the planning of upcoming activities, offer up some input and socialize with other members.
We are meeting for quarterly Social Crawls at some of our favorite Sacramento watering holes. These are strictly social events with no agenda. We want to encourage mentorship and fellowship with our other members so we are inviting other committees to join us at each event. Our next stop is June 29th at Golden Road Brewing with our members from AIA CV Academy of Architecture for Health.
AXP Tours are open to more members this year. While previously only open to those associate members working towards their AXP hours, we will now have a limited number of spots available for all of our other members as well.
Lastly, AIA California is working with all chapters this year to come up with a New ARE Study program. The idea is for individual chapters to host virtual study groups on a specific testing division. These will be supplemental to other study materials, but can be a valuable part of your study kit to be able to have discussions with others on the same path. This program is still in the building process, but they hope to kick off the first sessions this summer, so keep an eye out for future announcements.