What Does an Architect Do?

A few weeks ago, I spoke to one of my friend what he thinking architects basically do. His respond was, "I in person know architects do more than this, but I would presume that 95% of the common people would assume that all an architect do is design houses." This kind of opinion is pretty insulting and patronizing to the architects. As far as I am concern, in some countries (depending on local legislation), an architecture degree is not even mandatory for residential design. Nonetheless, as architects or architecture students, you should comprehend that it is your job to alert and educate your clients and peers as to precisely what it is that you actually do and what your responsibilities are. This, in itself, can potentially avoid many job-related problems, litigations, and in some cases, lawsuit.

Let me first elucidate what is an architect. An architect is a person who plans, designs, and sometimes oversees the construction of a building. Architects are the professional, artistic, and technically skilled creators, inventors, and designers. They should apply plethora of understanding and awareness to utilize in their thought processes in order to not only use in the design, but in the communication of ideas to clients. 

That said, I would like to illuminate some of the responsibilities that come with the job.

1: Space Programming

Architect sits with the owner, developer and/or users of the new building to develop the best possible space layout, adjacencies, and goals of the project.

2: Schematic design

Architect translates the owner’s needs into a rough building design. Beginning with gestural models and drawings which helps the architect develops the language of the building and ending with mass studies and eventually some sort of 3D model representing the building and style. This presented along with a rough, non detailed space layout will commonly conclude the schematic design phase after many revisions.

3: Design Development

The owner agrees to the design and the architect begins to run with it. Ordering a site survey, perhaps some soils testing the architect now has enough information to layout a site design, foundation & structure (may subcontract a structural engineer), mechanical and electrical (may subcontract a mechanical and electrical engineer), wall sections, building elevations, partition types, door and window schedules, code research, material choices etc. Essentially this is the point where most of the decisions about what the building actual is, gets decided.

4: Construction Documents

This stage takes the bulk of the time (40%-60%) and is where the architect and interns create the contract documents. These consist of detailed drawings showing every possible detail as it relates the building, from how walls are made, how door jambs are to be constructed, how the exterior cladding is to be connected tot he structure, how the building is to be water proofed and insulated, roofing details, etc.. This is also the point where we write the specifications for the project.

5: Bidding and Negotiation

This is the point where architect hands off the construction documents to the owner and assist in getting and receiving bids, answering questions from the bidding contractors and subcontractors, issuing addenda and clarifications and ultimately helping the owner to choose the right contractor for the job.

6: Construction Administration

This is the construction part of the project where architect acts as the contract authority and force both parties (owner and contractor) to meet the contract requirements. This means checking show drawings and issuing supplemental drawings to help the contractor install and build things appropriately and to the specifications. This is one of the most important stages, because this is where the quality will either be great or awful, depending on the correctness of the beforehand made specifications and details and the quality of the contractor.

Interview: How Much Does CGPA Matters?

An excellent university education is often cited as a obligatory precondition for getting a good job. Many a times with this thoughtful of the significance of university, a huge ratio of uni students get wrapped in their CGPA’s, as they believe it as the value statement of their own self-worth. Despite the fact that it is quite simple to presume that only super achievers with extremely high CGPA grades are more expected to get good jobs, the veracity is quite different. Whereas having a decent CGPA is significant, rest assured there are other ways to qualify too.

CGPA is a blend of numerous factors but isn’t actually the best indicator of how you will perform in the working world. We all know that person with high CGPA who struggles socially or that person who couldn’t care less about his or her university life but seems to have no trouble making great things happen in their life. Book smarts and street smarts are very different things.

Don't get me wrong, CGPA is super important but at the same time you must have other soft skills in order to secure a job during an interview. I myself graduated with HIGH CGPA but still managed to survive in the industry before i become a lecturer. Here i would like to share a story of my colleague who had interviewed candidates which to be hired in his company. Hope you guys can take this as a lesson. 

He had interviewed 4 candidates for 2 posts of Assistant Quantity Surveyor (QS) in his company. These were the candidates summary:

Candidate 1: CGPA 2.72 (Male)

Candidate 2: CGPA 3.55 (Female)

Candidate 3: CGPA 2.97 (Female)

Candidate 4: CGPA 3.41 (Female)

Candidate (2) and Candidate (4) came from among the best universities in Malaysia. Came with outstanding CGPA of 3.55 and 3.41. They brought in all the Dean List and Sijil Kecemerlangan along with them. The interviewer asked 10 questions to each candidate but they could only answer 3 out of 10 questions. They have no self confidence and the first impression was bad. They were not showing enthusiasm and interest on the job. They fail to elucidate how their skills match the job the applied for.

On the other hand, Candidate 1 and Candidate 3 came from medium ranked universities in Malaysia. They obtained average CGPA of 2.72 and 2.97. No dean list, no Sijil Kecemerlangan but they managed to answer 8 out of 10 questions. The spoken English was great. They have self-confidence. They understand about their scope of works as Assistant Quantity Surveyor. The first impression was great and the were presentable. And they have good leadership qualities in their CV's leading a few event during university life. And the interviewer lastly decided to hire Candidate 1 and Candidate 3 even though their academic qualification (CGPA) was not that great compared to Candidate 2 and Candidate 4.

Moral of the story, to secure a job upon graduation, CGPA alone not the criteria that will be evaluated. Most companies don't really bother whether you are high scorer as they only want to know what can you contribute to the company in order for them to make money. Employer also look for those street smart who got the ability to take charge, to volunteer for the tasks and to accepet accountability for achieving the required results of those task given.

Employer also look for someone who can work in a team not just sitting in front your table and do your own work. In addition, they are looking for someone with the ability to set priorities, to separate the relevant from the irrelevant tasks and then to concentrate single-mindedly until the job is complete. If they can have candidate with good CGPA, good attitude, presentable and got all the x-factor, then it is a bonus for my company to have them in.

To summarise, what employers need are people who can think, people who can create, people who have ideas and can express them. And that’s what writing is about. Even if you’re planning on a math or science career (where your calculus know-how might actually come in handy), you still need strong communication skills.

But, this is not an excuse for not doing well at university and taking for granted the aspect of CGPA. What i am trying to highlight here is; other than CGPA, there are a lot more important things you should "learn" to become an "excellent student". Maintaining a good CGPA will play a vital role for your academic success. Similarly, slacking it off could probably land you in academic probation or the university might not just grant you a great scholarship. If we look into the realities of the job market in Malaysia, majority of employers do not entail the same academic standards on their applicants. In general, almost 70% of hiring managers and employers do report the screening of applicants based on their average CGPA grades, but majority of the groups say that they use a CGPA of 3.00 as a standard for their cut-off.

10 Success Recipes

Fresh ingredients can perk up any recipe – including your recipe for success. Most of the time, both consciously and subconsciously, we borrow ingredients. We form our recipes from what we hear and see – after all, very few things these days are original. But we are all unique and can make use of these ingredients in unique ways. We are ever evolving. Depending on our present circumstances, the ingredients we create, choose, and borrow, we may come up with a success that’s totally different from other people’s. The three essential ingredients of anyone’s recipe for success are the Straight A’s of attitude, aptitude, and action. You can’t have one without the others. What’s your recipe for success? Here is a great recipe for success in life:

3 cups love ; 2 cups loyalty ; 3 cups forgiveness ; 5 table spoons hope ; 2 table spoons tenderness ; 4 quarts sharing ; 2 barrels of laughter.

Take the love and loyalty and mix it with sharing. Blend it with tenderness, forgiveness, and hope. Sprinkle abundantly with laughter. Bake it with sunshine. Serve daily in generous helpings. If you want to look back on a life that fills you with joy, conventional rules for success are not the place to start.

1. Don’t chase money, power, or status

If they come to you, that’s fine. But most conventional ideas about success go wrong because they focus on outcomes instead of on the processes of living. Outcomes come around from time to time, but life itself—the process of living, acting, thinking, and being—happens all the time. No outcome is going to make a lousy, miserable process feel worthwhile. If you hate what you do, no amount of power or money will make up for that. If your life is constantly stressful, boring, unhappy, or frustrating, how can achieving some high status once in a while make up for all the miserable days and weeks you spent getting there? It’s tempting to feel that the end will more than make up for the means; that you’ll forget the misery in the blaze of achievement. And you will—for a few moments. Then you’ll be back on the treadmill, with only the distant hope of some fresh achievement or monetary gain to console you. That’s like being a laboratory rat conditioned to unnatural behavior by occasional pellets of food.

2. Take whatever time you need to discover what matters to you most

Success isn’t simply a matter of money, power, or prestige. You could gain all of those and still feel that you have fallen short of what you wanted; or you could gain none of them and be blissfully happy and fulfilled. What constitutes personal success is mostly in your mind. It has much less to do with finding the best career in other peoples’ eyes, creating a killer business, or holding down a fancy job with a big salary than with achieving what really matters to you. Many people find this out too late. They struggle for years to get where other people said they should go, only to find it does little or nothing for them. Sad;y, it’s often too late by then to do anything else.

3. Don’t base your choices on others’ approval

We all want to please those we care about, so it’s natural to try to do what they approve. Natural, but rarely a good idea as the basis for life’s choices. I don’t say that you should deliberately ignore sound advice, or reject a career path simply because other people suggest it. But even the most loving parent or friend can’t always see what is going to make your heart sing. Listen to others. Value their input and their support. But go your own way. It’s better to be committed to doing what you truly love than accept something lesser for the sake of being approved by someone else.

4. Stay authentic

That means always doing what truly matters to you and is part of who you are. The simplest definition of a hypocrite is someone who says one thing and does another: like a person who says that he or she wants to work at something that benefits society, then forgets that at the first sight of a fistful of dollar bills. Somewhere inside of you is a part that recalls what truly matters and will never quite let you forget it. Over the years, that inner voice is only going to get louder.

5. Go for meaning over money every time

It’s perfectly possible to do something meaningless to you and earn a great deal of cash while doing so. Some people do, especially in parts of the media world. It just requires a stronger stomach and more cynicism that most people possess, plus a huge tolerance for boredom.

Is it worth it? If money is truly all that matters to you—and you can make lots of it quickly and get out—it might be. Few areas of work will allow you to do that, aside from criminal ones. Meaningless days corrode most peoples’ minds and destroy their happiness. Doing something that means a great deal to you almost always makes you feel energized and alive. It’s your choice.

6. Be endlessly greedy—for learning

You can never learn too much or overfill your mind with new ideas. Nothing is more useful in life than a well-developed, well-stocked mind, especially one that has been broadened and enlarged in the process. It’s hard to name a single famously successful person who was narrow-minded, bigoted, or stupid. The list of notable successes who are recognized for the power of their minds is long. And you don’t have to have had an expensive education to be able to develop a great mind. There have been plenty of near geniuses whose education was almost entirely self-produced.

7. Make a friend of failure

You are certain to fail sometimes, and the higher your aspirations, the more frequent and significant that failure will be. People who don’t strive for anything glorious rarely fail; they take no risks and never aim beyond what is easily attainable. But if you treat failure as an enemy, it’s going to lead only to discouragement and even the abandoning of your hopes and dreams. Failure can be a friend, pointing out what isn’t right yet and showing you the way to do better. The more proficient you become at accepting the lessons of failure, the quicker you will succeed.

8. Make sure that every time you make a mistake, it’s a new one

Making the same mistake several times shows that you haven’t learned what it can teach you. Making new mistakes proves that you’re trying something different. The best definition of a loser is someone who makes the same mistakes over and over again, never managing to learn anything in the process. Such a person is doomed.

9. Choose to spend your time with the right people

I don’t mean that in the sense of the rich and the powerful, the movers and shakers of society. Whether they’re powerful or not, the best people to spend time with are those from whom you can learn most: the ones whose own lives have brought them joy and endless fulfillment. That means people who do what they love and love what they do. People who have become experts in life, thinking people, people with wide-open minds and wide-open hearts. Seek them out wherever you can. Listen to them. Never mind if they are no longer living. Read their books and emulate their largeness of spirit. Learn from them all, but don’t simply copy what they did in this world. What they did was right for them, but may not be right for you. What you need to use as models are their ways of thinking and responding to the challenges of the world; the process of their lives, not what it happened to contain.

10. Drop whatever is inconsistent with these principles

That means all activities that don’t move you forward towards what you value most; things that get in the way of learning; pursuits that waste time and dull your senses; and people who hold you back. You may sometimes have to be ruthless. Each of us has only one life. If you waste it, you don’t get another chance. Besides, if you have chosen your dreams and aspirations wisely, what you must leave behind by dropping what’s inconsistent with those dreams will not be worth worrying about anyway. Those who make bad choices find, too late, that they have abandoned things and people that meant more to them than whatever they gained in exchange. If that happens, you have truly reached one of life’s lowest points.

Academic Malfeasance : Bogus and Fake Journals

Assalamualaikum and Hello to everyone:

With regards to the mounting pressure and demand to publish papers in international journals, it is frequently alluring for researchers and academicians to take the straight possible way to get their paper published. One of the quickest and easiest ways is to send those papers to fly-by-night on-line journals which are administered and controlled by unprincipled and dishonest publishers around the world who run their journals like commercial business entities. Desolately, the key stimulus of these publishers is not to choose papers based on the academic criterion, but to get as many as papers published in order to capitalize on their revenue.

Recently there are thousands of fake and bogus journals available on-line  It is admittedly hard, particularly for academicians and junior researchers like me, to always be able to assess the legality or authenticity of potential publication venues, especially when it comes to open-access journal publications, which are likely to charge publication fees. I have done some reading on this matter and I would encourage everyone too read vigilantly the content of any journal before proceed with publication./payment. In general, bogus or fake journals will have the following features:

1. very high publication regularity which is more than four issues annually.
2. high publication fees (in the range if USD250-USD1000) per paper. 
3. towering acceptance rate. Normally the mainstream journals be likely to have an acceptance rate in the region of 30%. 
4. the editorial board made up of ambiguous members where some of the journals will even list well-known academicians and researchers devoid of their knowledge. 
5. questionable and dubious quality of published papers for example non-standard handling of language, obvious methodological flaws etc.
6. rapid or quick reviewing of submitted papers. Normal range of reviewing process between two and six months, with longer wait times being common.
7. bring to light speedy turnaround time and promise authors quick review and publication of their manuscripts.

As a conclusion, with fake or bogus journals, what happens is that your paper might be accepted and published often devoid of any due review procedure. The individual who decides on the fate of your journal paper is nobody other than the editor, or worse, an editorial staff member. I won’t be flabbergasted that the decision to accept or publish your paper is perhaps based only on whether or not you have paid the publication fees.