IN MY EXPERIENCE, THERE ARE 3 ASPECTS THAT CONTINUALLY FEED THE MYTH:

The application of knowledge: the more immediately and obviously you can apply knowledge, the higher you will perceive its value. Goals & types of learning: University and practice have very different goals, and different timeframes for those goals. As a result, they engage in very different types of learning. Stage on the learning curve: What stage you are at on the learning curve affects how you view other stages of the learning curve.





You've probably noticed that each of these reasons relates to time. The time between learning and applying knowledge, the timeframes for short or long-term goals, and the time it takes to learn, internalise, and then reflect on your learning. Let's unpack them a little further.



1. The things you learn in practice Are immediately useful

Almost by definition, what you learn and do in practice is directly and immediately applicable to what you need to do practice.



For any company, time is money, and deadlines are pressure points - so you're very unlikely to spend time learning things that just might come in handy next month, let alone doing deeper learning of things that might underpin things you do in 5 years. No. The timeframe is much tighter than that. You learn how to draw something in the morning, and issue the drawing to consultants in the afternoon.



When I spell it out like this, the immediate applicability of learning in practice seems obvious. But let's unpack this a bit further.



How does immediate applicability affect how you value your learning?

In my experience, when you learn something and then can immediately and successfully put what you have learnt into practice, what you have learnt is also immediately validated. You can go home at the end of the day with a clear sense of accomplishment.



This means that, on the surface, the kind of learning you do in practice can seem more valuable than other kinds of learning. How you evaluate the value of what you've learned is skewed by the immediate validation. Your judgement is blurred.



2. university sets you up for longer term opportunities

In contrast, University is often geared towards longer term opportunities. Instead of aiming for immediate application, and attending to a problem at hand, university has different goals, aiming to:

Enable a depth of inquiry which is applicable over a much longer timeframe (your whole life, even);

Establish a breadth of inquiry which sets you up for a variety of outcomes and pathways after study.

Yes, this is different to the workplace. But so it should be! The difference is important, and together, architecture school and practice enable you to form your own pathway in architecture.



The role of architecture school is to lay the foundation. It is where you learn how the learn, and do the hard task of laying the groundwork for all further learning.



3. What you're learning NOW always seems more difficult

than what you learnt then

By the time you get into practice, university is probably largely behind you - the tears, heartache, passion and exaltation of success fade into memory. Everything you learnt during that time has been internalised (hopefully) or, unfortunately forgotten.

On the topic of forgetting things - the number of graduates I have seen who have forgotten key things they learnt at school, usually about structural systems, consenting processes, and the legal aspects of practice always astounds me. Make it your mission to really learn this information when you are encouraged to, rather than having to relearn with less support and more pressure in practice! This contributes to the myth that you learn more in practice than in architecture school, when the reality is that many people just aren't learning effectively in the first place, and so are having to re-learn later.

In contrast, each day in practice brings new challenges, new projects and deadlines - in fact often, no one day's work is exactly like another. On top of the work you're doing, you're also learning how the world of practice works: from workplace dynamics, to client management, to project structures and systems. It's no wonder that what you're learning now seems more difficult than what you learnt then - because you are going through the difficult process of learning. It's just human nature.

BUT REMEMBER THAT WHEN YOU'RE AT UNIVERSITY, IT ALSO FEELS LIKE THE MOST DIFFICULT THING IN THE WORLD.

Concepts feel completely ungraspable, and the amount of information about structural systems and construction methods that you need to learn feels overwhelming. Often, the types of learning you are doing - either in the design studio or in technical lectures - bear little resemblance to the classroom discussions about novels you had at school. With hindsight, high school seemed a breeze.



Let's not devalue this.

THE LEARNING WAVE - CRESTS AND TROUGHS

To me, learning isn't so much a curve, as a series of waves. You go through the crests and troughs of:

unlearning;

relearning;

questioning and consolidating; and finally

mastering.

Sometimes these waves can be moving in different directions, confusing the overall patterns. And every once in while, you'll get everything lined up, and ride the crest of mastery.



Your last year of university is one of those rare moments of mastery - you've internalised everything you struggled with in the first years of university, and you're at the top of your game, ready to move on to the next thing. It can be a shock to get a job and suddenly end up back at the bottom of the wave - have to unlearn and relearn things so you can complete tasks in the specific way your office does them.



Because of where you are on the wave, you're more likely to think that what you're learning right now is the most important and most difficult thing ever. And in doing so, you forget all the learning and failing and testing it took for you to reach that last crest of mastery.