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on the intro workshop
Seriously sorry for the lack of posts to all the few people that are reading this. I dove in headfirst into the ENDS program and I haven’t had a chance to get myself together. After a whole semester, I have to say I’m enjoying it very much. It’s such a breath of fresh air from the past two years where it was really starting to feel like you’re drudging through all these random courses and getting nowhere. After talking to many of my colleagues, it doesn’t even feel like school anymore. It’s also very motivating to be in a group of hardworking and like-minded people. When you see your studiomate furiously sketching, you feel like you should do it too. All in all, it all really started with the Intro Workshop.
Intro Workshop
Before the fall semester starts, all incoming ENDS, MARCH and LARCH students give up the last rays of sun to do a two-week workshop that gives you a nice introduction to the program. It’s an additional $500 dollars and mandatory. It’s really the only time the ENDS students ever get to interact with M’ARCH students so it’s really interesting to see how graduate students work and how undergraduate students work. We get tours to places around Vancouver and some lectures and thankfully, some free food! For our workshop, the theme was resources and that was the idea we were suppose to think about throughout the two weeks.In our first week, we visited different locations all around Vancouver and we’re suppose to learn how to draw and think in different scales ranging from 1:1 - 1: 10000. We visited Wreck Beach, Richmond, EPCO Steel Plant, Seymour Watershed, Strathcona Neighbourhood and the Delta Landfill. As you can tell, most of the locations were supposedly “resources”. It was really interesting to see some of these places that usually, you would never be able to see, especially the steel plant. We had to finish a series of drawings from each location and lets just say that was quite a challenge for undergrads.
In the second week, we got into separate groups to come up with design installations for different areas of a SALA Intro-Workshop party which was fun. In our group, we got to figure out the designs for the seating lounge. It was like a crash course on how to figure out designs and learning to SIMPLIFY. I felt like it really us a good idea of working with people that you’re going to spend two years with and figuring out how to design in a big group which definitely WASN’T easy. I feel as if I could kill the people that I’ve only met for a week but at the very end, the party made the whole experience worth it.
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Overall, my first semester was extremely stressful. It took a long time to adjust to the intense schedule that the program expects from you. Most of time, I’m really either in class or in the studio from 9:30am until 9pm and everything takes double or triple time I expected it to take. But if I think if you’re really enjoy doing it, it’s not that bad at all. Time pasts by so quickly and I think the people that you’re with really makes the program what it is.
