Most high school students spend their days inside schools.
Seven Wilson Talent Center students are about to figure out how to design one.
Students from Wilson Talent Center’s engineering and construction programs recently kicked off a 15-week experience through the ACE Mentor Program at Mayotte Group Architects.
And their assignment isn’t exactly small.
Design and develop a brand-new elementary school.
From January through May, students will work alongside industry professionals while exploring the many disciplines required to take a building from an idea to something people can actually use.
That means discovering that designing a school involves much more than drawing a building.
Students will be introduced to design and architecture, hand drafting, site planning, landscape architecture, civil, structural and environmental engineering, surveying, construction management, interior design and more.
Along the way, they’ll also encounter something that can be difficult to recreate inside a classroom: how all of those specialties depend on one another.
An architect’s idea has to work for an engineer. A site creates constraints. Materials matter. Spaces need to work for the people who will actually use them. And decisions made during one stage of a project can affect everything that follows.
That’s where mentorship adds another layer.
Instead of only hearing about careers they might pursue someday, students get to spend time with the people already doing the work—asking questions, seeing how professionals approach problems and discovering jobs they may not have known existed.
For students already studying engineering and construction at Wilson Talent Center, the experience provides a bridge between what they’re learning now and where those skills might eventually take them.
And there’s something fitting about their first major challenge being a school.
These students know what it feels like to walk into a building designed for learning.
Now they get to stand on the other side of the blueprint and ask:
What should that place be?
By May, they’ll have an answer of their own.
But perhaps more importantly, seven students will have a much clearer picture of the people, professions and possibilities involved in building it.
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