well, the honeymoon (read: glad to be in any job that was not my previous one) period is over.

the excitement of a new job.
the prospect of once again enjoying what I do.
the knowledge that I was never ever going to have to step foot again through one particular door in bloomsbury again.

seems to have worn off.

and now I am right back to where I started, inexplicably stuck in a world I had absolutely no intention of ever joining in the first place.

over the course of this fellowship and working with the foundation I have been surrounded by traditionalist architects, which was never anything I was particularly drawn to. I came over here for the urbanism. which was fabulous for the first year. while working at the foundation I got to work on quite a few fascinating urban projects and was thoroughly enjoying myself.
but when it came to our second year, the placement year, there were no urban firms hiring. (or the foundation was unwilling to look beyond their close circle of traditional architecture practitioners. prolly a bit of both.) so I found myself in a traditional architecture practice. and a pretty horrible one at that. after fighting with it for over 8 months, I found myself another job. which was fabulous. the only thing was it still needed to be approved by the foundation, as I was still under the duration of the fellowship. so, inevitably, I was moving to another traditional architecture practice.

granted, this one is not as hard-core (has that term ever been applied to traditional architecture before?) as the last, they do a lot of modern interiors. but it still is what it is.

and granted the atmosphere is a vast improvement on the previous office. and I actually get to be involved in the projects I am working on. attending meetings, meeting clients, going on site visits. I even have my own little project, a flat renovation, to work on.

but as of mid last week, I realized that all that really happened is I have transplanted my sidetracked ambitions to a slightly greener field.

I am still stuck in the proverbial mud.

however, last week I also received the news that I got into the graduate program I am quite keen on at University College London. the one that will (hopefully) propel me into the world of humanitarian architecture and design. the one that will point me in the direction I would like my life to go in.
so there is a light at the end of the tunnel!

but I wasn't able to get my finances in order to be able to start the program this september. FAFSA in very difficult to work with if you are not currently residing in the US. so I am going to see if I can defer my admission for a year (another friend of mine is also doing this, for the same program, so we will be in the same year! which is fabulous), which will give me time to work with FAFSA and apply to all the scholarships whose application deadlines had already passed by the time I decided to apply to the course a few months ago.

I am wicked excited about all this, but it also means finding a job to allow us to stay in the UK for next year until my student visa can kick in, as my (our) current visa(s) expire end of august. and what's the easiest way to find somebody to sponsor my work visa? appeal to the network of contacts I already have and know. which are almost exclusively from the foundation. who are almost exclusively traditional architects. Which means one more year of this wandering through purgatory, meta-intellectually/career-ically speaking.

but if that's what I need to do, that's what I need to do. Ben and I both want to stay on in the UK (preferably London, but other locations are being looked at), and while I will look into other employment options, the economy is still in a state over here and neither one of us can afford to be that picky. non-EU immigrants can't be choosers, so to speak.

but the fact that there is a concrete end in sight makes this all a hell of a lot easier.
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