I am a landscape architecture student who took a few detours to get where I am now. My career involved stops like painting, aquarium animal tech, and residential master planning, so as a result I have become comfortable in interdisciplinary environments.
When I arrived at LWLA as a summer intern in June, I realized that I had found other people who switch between ways of thinking a lot. Staff at LWLA wear quite a few hats; we have to think like field ecologists one day, designers another, and construction managers the next. I was blown away that the same teammates who could identify hundreds of forbs in an immature state (out of flower and nestled amongst a thousand other nondescript weeds) were also acting as designers or project management specialists on other days. Though different members of the office act as experts in different areas, there is a shared body of language common to us all, and an understanding of the work other people do.
I sometimes struggle to place emphasis when explaining to people outside the field what I do. Do I present the work as ecology or environmental science–understand living systems and replicating their patterns in a different condition? Do I emphasize the design process –generating ideas communicating them successfully? Do I emphasize the construction aspect—knowing how things assemble on a site and overseeing that projects get put together correctly?
Those hard distinctions feel less important to me after working here; if I want to propose great designs, the best way to get there is to continue to grow my plant knowledge and increase my exposure to construction administration. A job title or degree certificate sometimes doesn’t tell the whole story about the amount we leaned on other people, interests, or experiences to form our expertise. I think LWLA has embraced that understanding of a career, and it has made a big impact on me.