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NEWS / FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
Shina Gupta, a sophomore in Aerospace Engineering from Lenexa, works early into the morning around 3 on Thursday. She said the lab was usually packed, by but 3 or 4 a.m., "it's usually just me."
Ben Pirotte /KANSAN
Ben Pirotte/KANSAN
completely affected," Alonzi said.
"Once a week I would have a mental freak-out, saying I can't do this major. I can't handle it."
Eric Vogel, a senior from Prairie Village and a civil engineering student, works early into the morning around 3 on Thursday in a lab in Eaton Hall. He was working on an ArcGIS project, as he plans on graduating in Mav.
As she approached Eaton daily and stood outside its glass doors, she came to resent it more. The daily demands of the labs and the school's ambitious students breed an intense culture, a survival of the fittest. Being one of few females in an overwhelmingly male program doesn't help. Independence brings pride, Alonzi said. Needing help brings judgment.
Once, during early-morning hours when her strained system just couldn't make a program work, her eyes slowly welled up with tears. She dropped her head to the desk. Overloaded. Overworked. Overwrought. An older student walked over and, seeing her crumpled state, offered wisdom: "It only gets worse."
--working for a review later this week. A dozen or so students work in Marvin's computer lab, focused on screens displaying 3-D images of their design. When a body passes by the open door, they all look up, a break from monotony. Others pace the unlit hallways leading to rooms where models are made.
"Charette," a French word meaning "cart," bears a daunting weight in schools of architecture. At the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the influential arts school of 1800s Paris, it was common for architecture students to work on design plans right up until a deadline. Throughout the city's streets they could be seen on the school cart, scribbling furiously on their design plans, even in the final minutes before submitting them to professors. They were on the cart, "en charette."
Charette, in both term and practice, passed through generations of architecture students who brought it to the professional field and shaped the culture. Now, at midnight on a Saturday, the rooms of Marvin Hall are abuzz with students en charrette
Bright, red pipes line the white ceilings of one such studio. Below them, Dani Boyd and Maia Hoelzinger are fast at work. Each at separate drawing tables across the room, they rarely face each other, even when they talk. But even an unseen voice is company on nights like these.
"You always have something to talk about," Hoelzinger says. "I'll be here 'til delirium hits, maybe three o' clock."
"I'm here all waking hours, except when I eat breakfast," says Boyd, She pauses. "Wait, I ate breakfast here, too."
White boards intersperse with wooden cabinets on the walls. Dirty-grey titles, the kind custodial staffs rarely get a chance to clean, make up the floor beneath their feet. On top of the room's many desks lie the staples of a student-architect: an empty 24 package of Pepsi, boxes of Kraft Easy Mac, some peanut butter. Most, if not all, of the day's meals are taken here.
"I don't ever cook, even though I love to cook," Boyd says. Her go-to food in studio is Cheez-its. "What'd you have for dinner?" she asks Hoelzinger.
"Taco Bell and coffee," Hoelzinger replies. "I'm going to kill myself."
After years of studio life — late nights, little sleep, and less socializing — Boyd and Hoelzinger are used to it.
"Obviously we get frustrated and have to step away or else we'll stab something." Hoelzinger says as she cuts model pieces with an X-Acto knife. "There's too many sharp objects in here."
When studio gets especially demanding. Boyd and Hoelzinger have used prescription stimulants, too.
"It it gets tough," Boyd says. "I've enjoyed Adderall the times I've done it."
Adderall is another pill-form ADHD treatment used on college campuses as a stimulant, either for partying or marathon studying.
"I don't take Adderall recreationally," Holzelinger adds. "I wouldn't waste it on that."
For students in time-intensive programs, drugs and alcohol serve two purposes: to speed up or help cope. Kerwin said prescription stimulants are easy to find: "If you're a dealer and want to sell Adderall, you go to the architecture school."
Other drugs play a role, too, she said. "There's a lot of marijuana usage, just for relaxing. You go in front of the computer just stoned and working on floor plans."
Staci Ashcraft, a junior in architectural engineering who says she studies about 70 hours each week, sees the need to numb academic pressures. "You push yourself so hard one day and you know you have to do it again the next," she said. "But you always know the alarm will come too soon. A student I know in chemical engineering drinks every night when he
finishes. He's like, "My mind's just blown, and I have to cope."
Students can be impaired on campus without food or drugs, said Nancy Hamilton, an associate professor in psychology who researches sleep deficiency.
"Data suggests that sleep-deprived driving is as bad or worse than
being drunk on performance," she said. She added that the effect could apply to any routinized activity, whether cutting boards for models or building racecars. Hamilton also said sleep deficiency — for most, anything less than six hours — weakens immune systems, enables stress and starts a vicious cycle in
academic programs.
"It's a self-defeating culture in programs like engineering and architecture particularly, with accumulative acquisition of knowledge," she said. "In architectural terms, if your foundation is bad and you build on a bad foundation, then your
"This can be a life-or-death issue for the architecture profession as well, not only individually but also collectively. Once exploitation becomes part of the culture of a group, it tends to perpetuate itself just as abused youths are more likely to become abusive parents. It also tends to color all relationships. How much does the mistreatment that architects accept from developers, for example, have to do with the tacit acceptance of such behavior within the profession's own ranks?
Resolving the problem will require further effort by faculty and administrators at schools ...and a stronger stigma being attached to the exploitation of employees. But most of all, it will demand that students and recent graduates simply not take it anymore."
THOMAS FISHER Dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota published in editorial "Patterns of Exploitation"
Driven by the clock
Senior Steven Heger spends the night working for his mechanical engineering class
Photos by Ben Pirotte
11 p.m. to 7 a.m. — Steven Heger, a senior in mechanical engineering from Wichita, works dozens of hours every week on the Formula-style cars for Jayhawk Motorsports, which is the capstone project for mechanical engineering seniors. Last Tuesday, he worked throughout the night, as the debut of the car was the following Saturday.
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Steven Heger wipes his face in exhaustion late last Tuesday night when working and Cameron Bryant. The car they were working on was debuting that Saturday the norm.