- this guy right here, JP - spent those 4 years of my life trying to convince me out of wanting to major in Math and Physics in college (I wanted to do those because I found them interesting and because I was good at it, back in the day). We compromised with architecture, because I told him flat out I didn't want to be a starving artist (which he had once been, back in Paris, surviving on a baguette and an avocado daily) in the future.

When I arrived at MIT, I pretty quickly realized that there wasn't really any other major that could possibly fit me. All the other majors seemed too technical, too rigid, too not art for me. So I stuck with it.

I won't bore you with all the details of my sophomore year - second-guessing myself, crying nearly every night because of my studio professor, how nothing was working out - but somehow now, looking back on it, I don't mind it so much. I got a pretty cool project out of the class, and I'm tougher than ever when it comes to harsh professors and negative criticism. Once I was obsessive over my work and everything had to be perfect. Now I've learned to explore and experiment with geometry and shape and more importantly, how to distance myself from my work.

I find the creative process in architecture studios so valuable now that all the nitty-gritty hard work - modeling in 3d space, altering geometries, having to redo everything to fix one tiny little mistake, making physical models (the worst part? stairs. I. hate. stairs.) - is somehow kind of worth it. So late Friday nights, when I'm stuck in studio gluing away at small pieces of paper or trying to come up with a straightforward logic for my ideas, don't seem so bad... and when my professor comes in the next week and praises my work - that feels pretty awesome.

Besides, I get to watch a really ridiculous amount of tv in studio. How else am I supposed to get through hours and hours and hours of gluing and cutting and fixing?