Amrita Raja, FLUID Mentor 2022
I am an architect and I found out about Fluid through a friend who was on the Shape programme because she was starting her own practice. At the time I was going through some career changes myself and looking to be a mentee on the 2021 Fluid programme. I was fortunate enough to be accepted onto the programme as both a mentee and a mentor. So I was working through some changes going on in my own career with my mentor and working with a mentee who was transitioning from a year out as a Part II and trying to decide what to do about her Part III and job changes.
I had a really rewarding experience working with her as a mentor. We were 100% remote because she was in the north of the country and I was in the south. We were able to build a rapport in spite of that and actually we have stayed in touch. So we have informal touch points, through WhatsApp messages, and I still speak with her for a formal mentoring session every couple of weeks. It is such a rewarding experience that we’ve carried on.
Last year I had my son and started working with Dianez who also has a young son who’s just a little older than mine, and that’s an interesting parallel, both of us being young first-time mums trying to navigate changes in career. My relationship with Dianez is maybe more peer-like than it was with my previous mentee, who was a bit younger than me and I’d been through some of the things she was going through.
Dianez is in the States, where I’m from, before I came to the UK. I didn’t realise that the programme was open to participants abroad so I’m delighted that Danna and her team were able to find an American to partner with Dianez. The positives and the challenges of this arrangement are interesting. For us, the time difference has been a challenge, for me at least. Working around the timing and schedules of a young child, and trying to get that to line up with a five hour time difference, can prove tricky. We try to time the sessions for her son’s afternoon nap and my dinner time. This is fine, but I’m moving to Dubai in a month so the time difference will be even greater.
Dianez graduated in 2010 and she’s trying to get into interior design. My undergraduate training was also in interiors, I even did an internship as an interior designer, but I’ve always practiced as an architect and I’ve always practiced in the UK. So, even though my background is American, most of my experience is abroad. That said there are networks that I can still tap into in the States and I’ve been happy to offer these to Dianez, as best as I can. Career change at any point can be tricky but Dianez does have the advantage of being able to look back to her education or in her recent professional experience and tap into any network she may have there.
Dianez was on unaccredited programmes while she was studying, which aren’t recognised now, but I think it’s probably easier to have an unconventional career path into a design career in the States than it is here in the UK. If you are lucky enough to have the financial means, you can pursue a Masters in anything, regardless of your background. For example, I didn’t have an architecture undergraduate degree. I went on to do my Masters in architecture (alongside biochemists and math graduates) in a professional programme which led to my architectural qualifications. This path is a big financial commitment. If you don’t have that scope, which in fairness isn’t open to everyone, and you are trying to move into a design career later on in life, you’d probably go down an apprenticeship route and build up a network of people, working on your own portfolio, taking some initiative to do that, and then get yourself an internship.
Having been in a position of interviewing Part Is and Part IIs, the degree is only worth so much. There’s no guarantee with a person who went to a certain school and walked out with certain qualifications. The things that you’re looking for when you are hiring are initiative, the desire to be in the practice, the inquisitiveness, as well as the software skills. Maybe 10 years ago things would have been harder but now that people who are doing the hiring have changed, I think there’s more openness to alternative career paths, and not so much that you have to have done x, y, and z in order to be valuable.
For me, I was very lucky in being able to attend a top institution and to build contacts through that, but it was the contacts that I made there that got me my job, not the degree. Even after graduating, I arrived in the UK not knowing anyone, and my next job came about because I made a really positive impression on my former boss. It wasn’t because I had a degree in my back pocket, so I keep reminding Dianez, it’s the work and how you relate to people that is what gets you to where you are. Especially if you can’t fall back on the qualifications.
One of our initial conversations was about trying to get outside of what Dianez had preconceived as achievable during a 12 month mentoring programme– a bit of a blue sky thinking – and our next session was trying to rein that back to what was achievable and realistic.
It’s at this point that Dianez thought that maybe it’s a two year project, rather than one. That was really productive. With a lot of things going on in her life it’s important to whittle down to the one thing she can do this week, which will make her feel like she’s taking a step forward. Trying to balance new challenges of young children with existing challenges of work/life really does have to be in manageable bites. One of my favourite expressions is "there's only one way to eat at an elephant - one bite at a time."
I have been able to reflect on conversations that I’ve had with Dianez and apply them to my own career. A few years ago I started to do a lot more writing in addition to my design practice work. There were parallels in our early conversations about how you break into a field where you might not have contacts, where might not have experience and so I was able to use our conversations to help me fuel the writing I was doing, which was useful to me. That, and being able to talk about what it’s like being a young mum and colleagues in the same boat!
I think there’s a balance of merit in face to face (in person or virtual) sessions and being able to correspond offline, referred to, in the work world as asynchronous collaboration. It’s the idea that you can send an email or text message that’s not urgent so a colleague can get back to you in their own time and you’re still benefitting from a back and forth without having to be locked into a specific time and date. As we move into hybrid ways of working I think mentoring can benefit from that. I’ve seen this with both my mentees.
I’m a problem solver and I have to work really hard in our sessions to not solve Dianez’s problems. The training we get at the beginning of the programme, as mentors, is really useful and I have to remind myself to ask more questions than give answers. If you feel as a mentor under pressure to come up with something, the reality is that you don’t have to. It’s a conversation.