Saturday 13 March 2010

February and March!


Hello everybody!
After our holidays in Scotland over Christmas, things got a bit boring for me over here.  Staying at home almost every day, having no money to go out and no friends to hang out with outside the really really self focused LBS crowd, it made my morale go down quite steeply.  More so, not hearing back from the 120 resumes sent to various architectural firms just added a sense of uselessness to my stay in London.  To get out of my boredom, I decided to create a website that would feature my portfolio in hope that future employers find the idea interesting and a bit more professional than the old 8.5 x 11in portfolio sample piling up in the bottom drawer of the receptionist’s desk.  So there I was, learning to make website from scratch using a new software I had never used before (Flash).  The experience was somewhat painful since I hadn’t realized the extent of code writing required in the process.  Nevertheless I stuck with it eventually came up with something that I was happy enough to put online.  Since the website features 3 of my areas of interest, I came up with a name that could encompass architecture, photography and graphic design: DTMCREATE.  As you know, DTM are my initials and “create” is imprecise enough to represent any creation process involve in my work.  You can view my website at www.dtmcreate.com.  Of course, it’s a first stab at it and there’s room for improvement but that will come later. 
The Friday before I wanted to put my website online, I received an e-mail from an architectural firm asking me if I was available right away and if I could come for an interview in that afternoon.  Sure enough, I went and right there, during the interview, the principal told me he would “try me out” for a while and that I was to start the next Monday.  I never had to send my website address to any architecture offices but hey, it’s not a bad situation to be in at the moment. 
So I have been working for 3 weeks now and it’s great.  The firm is really small, only 3 of us, which means I get to do pretty much everything.  We do a lot a residential work like refurbishments of London house and/or flats.  Not necessarily super design oriented, but at least stuff gets built!  Technically, I still don’t know if I am hired for longer than my “try-out” period.  I still haven’t heard from the principal but, he told me “see you on Monday” so I think it’s a good sign, at least for the next week.
So that’s what I have been doing for the last2 months.
DTM