4 Years and 4 Months at Zenerate and After (3)
2025. 02. 01.
After a long journey of 4 years and 4 months at Zenerate, I'm going back to school to finish my undergraduate degree. My extended leave of absence has finally run its course, and now I must truly attend classes. These days, I've been reflecting on my experience as a software engineer at a startup.
3. Graduation looming ahead¶
As life flowed by, I entered university in 2012 but still haven't graduated. When I first enrolled, I never imagined that my thesis advisor would leave the school before me, or that I'd be attending classes with students more than a decade younger... I think I've done everything I wanted to do since my 20s until now. Starting with architectural design major, I added an interdisciplinary major in media arts, and even a minor in computer science, taking as many classes as possible - I just checked and found out I've completed 222 credits. I've also gained diverse industry experience by taking leaves of absence. I feel like I've done enough exploring and it's time to graduate.
The issue is that I need to complete my graduation project. There's an architecture department graduation exhibition next semester. After 8 years of development work where I've learned to draw service architecture diagrams and create programs, now I need to draw architectural diagrams and plan programs. I'm really-really-really worried about how to avoid a career gap while successfully graduating.
While working at Zenerate, I created a architectural design engine that generates building masses and floor plans for units within them, so I could consider using this topic for my graduation project. However, I'm not really considering this option. First, directly subscribing to and using the service is problematic because various regulations and building types are based on US standards. Additionally, reimplementing the engine I developed to fit the graduation project would mean exposing the know-how I've built up at Zenerate, so I'm not considering it as an option.
I'm currently thinking about creating experiential spaces through game-like methods. As I've written in previous posts, if space is a platform that mediates people's experiences, and if an architect's job is to design spaces and experiences and suggest methods to create them, then I don't think it's strange to handle virtual space design within the realm of architecture. However, rather than creating 'spaces' as mentioned earlier, I want to focus more on the process of 'creating' itself, and I'm thinking about methods to express the space I want to create - corresponding to traditional architectural diagrams and drawings. The result will likely be an application running on smartphones or computers with associated servers and databases. Whether this approach to the graduation project will be acceptable remains to be seen once I actually take the class, but for now, I've started learning Unity.