In Canada, the Unemployment office is the place to go to when you need career guidance. Here you register to collect a handout until you find work, review job listings, moan about life and hope someone listens. I had been in and out of the offices for the past few months but really didn’t qualify for the government programs since I had taken temp work, and therefore was not unemployed. I knew that, but hoped that a chance existed for retraining or something similar. It was early in the summer, and college applications were well past due, although the start-up dates were still months away. The government worker looked at me like I was crazy. My only hope would be to get into a program that was only available to recently let go workers who had a steady employment history. If I had been let go from a steady job, then I could go back to school. As long as I was temping, there wasn’t much they could do for me. Besides, my high school transcripts didn’t show a stellar performer. There was no way I would survive University. Maybe I should consider something else. Like College.

College. My parents had always described college as the place where losers who weren’t good enough went. It was that in between place where you would be lost from, never finding work and never finding success. College was a world of dope-smoking losers, while University was a world of Ivy-league geniuses. I had never considered college. I didn’t want to be a loser. The career counselor was surprised by my response.

I can remember her comment that College grads were coming out of school with a lesser debt load, and were finding jobs faster than university grads. That the hands on knowledge and practical experience gained through college was very much in demand with employers and that even if you didn’t find work out of college, you could transfer your credits toward university. Although I didn’t qualify for any government assistance, the counselor offered to put me in touch with the chair of engineering (Mr. B.) at Mohawk College to further explore the opportunity that might exist for me. I accepted and grudgingly went to the appointment.

I went to the college more than a little nervous. I was sure I was wasting the time of this man, and I wasn’t sure how I could make things work to my favour. I would have to give it an honest try though, or live forever knowing that I had given up on myself. The words of Dylan (Bob) ran through my mind… “When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.” Mr. B. heard my concerns and told me not to worry. He looked at my transcript, and his comment was that these marks were less than acceptable even for college entry. I was a little ashamed. Then he mentioned that he had searched my name on the college records and that I had come up as having apprenticed as a machinist – was that true?

I had taken my machinists apprenticeship through a satellite campus of the college, and had really applied myself since at the time I thought my future would rely on the success of my apprenticeship. I hadn’t realized just how much that was true. Mr. B. became much more interested in my success after seeing how I had done so well in the apprenticeship. I ran through my history with him, and as he listened he began to smile.

He asked me why I wanted to become an architect, and I related to him that I loved the idea of creating something spectacular within a framework of rules. I loved the idea of creating a structure that could touch lives of hundreds or thousands of people. I loved that I could, at the end of a project see something, and that my work would be real and tangible and have meaning and form and be at once a work of art and science and mathematics. All of that appealed to me.

Mr. B. looked at me then and asked something that changed my outlook on a perfect career. It was a simple question. “What happens to the building industry when the economy slows? And what do you think happens to the Architectural Techs when that happens?”

My father had bought a business right at the beginning of the downturn of the 1980’s, and we had nearly been bankrupted by the circumstances then. I didn’t want my family to endure something like that. I wanted to be recession proof. I wanted to have a career that would survive downturns, and thrive in upturns of the economy, and Mr. B. was right. Housing, and building have always been a prime economic indicator. I felt that returning to school as I was, I had to get things right in the first go. I felt immense pressure to get this right. I couldn’t afford to not succeed.

I mentioned the possibility of continuing to university if I did well at college. I thought that maybe by having a degree I would be more recession-proof than with a diploma. He shook his head. In good firm they will look out for you but you would still be on your own. But there is another option, another path that meets all your expectations, but that you likely haven’t thought of. In fact in this path you would touch more lives, be more "recession proof", and make more money than you would on the architecture path. He definitely had my attention.

I remember him telling me how my history was unusual, but that it made me a perfect fit for a career that would involve reaching out to the public and winning their endorsement of touchy projects, and that I would do well in difficult calculations and mathematical problems if I could learn to apply the maths used in the machine shop to a different kind of problem, and that my evident love of art would lead me to be able to design a built form that would be more than utilitarian. Rather than build a single structure he suggested that I could build cities and neighbourhoods and networks that would carry people and good s across not only town, but across continents. I should become a Transportation Technologist, with the possibility of becoming a Transportation Engineer.

It was a career I had never heard of, but it all made sense. By specializing in the building of roads and transit networks, I would be protected from economic downturns. When the economy tanks, governments fund infrastructure improvements to keep things rolling, and I would be at the forefront of the design/build process. When things are good, private developers need infrastructure built to serve their new construction starts and to support their initiatives. New retail needs parking, new cities need roads and transit networks, growing countries need goods movement studies and rail movement studies and airport designs, and the list goes on and on and on. And what’s more, the field is so badly under serviced that there is a 5 year backlog of available staff in many areas.

I handed him an application at the end of the meeting with a thick black line through the words “Architectural Technologist”, and written in “Transportation Engineering Technologist.” I had signed up for 3 ½ years of college with a mortgage and a kid and no chance of paying for it. I figured I’d wing it. Again I had made a conscious decision. The Black line was the most important element of the application.