This week in ISM was definitely a learning experience for me. We spent our time putting together our professional portfolios (binders), coming up with 25 professionals to call, and then actually contacting them. Although it was nerve-wracking, I thought it would prove to be useful in the near future.
Firstly, we put together our professional binders. I learned how to maintain a theme and build a brand for myself. I thought using the color scheme I used for this website would be nice and consistent, so that's what I did. I used a combination of blacks, whites, grays and light pinks to create my professional binder. Another thing that was important about the binders was consistency, not just for color schemes, but for fonts as well. I used the same font throughout and although I questioned whether lowercase letters were professional, my teacher informed me that as along as they were consistent, it was fine.
Next, we worked on gathering a list of professionals in our field who we wanted to interview. I used a basic search engine to find some people. It was through Google actually, that I found a website called Houzz. It seemed to have a lot of contact information about architects near my location.
I found 25 contacts faster than I expected. The nerve-wracking part, however, was actually contacting them. Although we will be continuing to contact various professionals in the next few weeks, we had started this week. At first, I felt to nervous to call, so I emailed one of my contacts. She replied fairly quickly at first, saying she and her company was unavailable. Then I called another one of my contacts, and they didn't pick up. Although I didn't have much success, I'll keep trying next week.
