Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

When Grace Hong’s architecture studio class admitted to their professor they’d all been sleep deprived for weeks, she said he was “understanding” despite having been unaware of their situation. But many architecture students say such a reception has only recently become more common in the program.

Although it’s known for its culture of normalizing — even glorifying —unhealthy working habits, students in Syracuse University’s architecture program said they are recognizing a shift to prioritizing mental health.

“When I started, I would say the majority of the culture, mostly among the older faculty, was (to) work late nights … in studio (and) eat, breathe, sleep studio,” said Sofia Gutierrez, a fourth-year architecture student. “Right now, it’s kind of shifting more toward work-life balance.”

The program requires studio classes, which students explained are six-credit, four-hour hands-on courses where students apply technical and conceptual skills learned in core classes. In these classroom environments, which usually consist of fewer than 20 people, students work on individual and group design projects and receive weekly critiques from professors.

Architecture students are required to take studio classes every semester until their fifth and final year in the program, when the class serves as a thesis course.

Through these semesterly courses, students said the school’s faculty stress the importance of building “studio culture,” or rapport amongst peers through collaborating and providing feedback on design projects during class.

Studio classes are held three times a week, and that time commitment results in creative, supportive work environments, students said, as well as tight-knit friendships.

Gutierrez recalled the close bond in one of their freshman year studio classes. In the architecture world, students and professors said, a culture of competition and pushing oneself to unhealthy limits is well-known to be consuming.

“We would go eat together, and the freshmen would take up four entire tables in Ernie,” they said. “It was really wholesome.”

Yet the studio class environment can also be very competitive, students said, to the point where students often compare their personal working and sleeping habits with their peers’ and question whether they are working hard enough. At times, Hong said she’s felt pressured to pull all-nighters if she learned another peer was going to, even if she hadn’t originally planned to do so.

Though experiences varied by studio class cohorts, students said studio professors can perpetuate these attitudes, especially if professors hold the course with utmost importance in the program.

“Assigning five drawings that are due in two days is unrealistic, but it still happens and everyone still does it,” Hong said.

Third-year architecture student Zander Leff said professors themselves are being overworked, which exacerbates the situation when students don’t have a healthy example to follow.

“(When a) professor comes in, she’s got massive circles under her eyes and she’s like, ‘Yeah, guys. Sleep is really important. Who else here is exhausted out of their mind?’” he said. “I’m like, ‘Dude, you can tell us that all you want. But how do you fix it? You are clearly suffering.’”

During his first year, Leff said faculty acknowledged the lack of ‘studio culture’ in his graduating class caused by COVID-19 restrictions. During that time, students only attended studio class every other week, where they sat far apart from one another and only half of the class at a time, he said.

Because of the pandemic’s pervasiveness in their freshman year, the lack of a concrete sense of community has led to an even greater disparity in how students interpret and respond to professors’ workload demands, even among students from the same studio class, he said. He added that his class feels more distant than other years below and above his own.

“We all react wildly differently to the impulses we’re facing, and we don’t share a lot about that,” he said. “It’s kind of like, if you’re doing well, you feel bad because (you think) everyone else is suffering, and if you’re suffering, you don’t want to share that with anyone. So you’re internalizing it and trying to get over it on your own.”

For Donovan Hernandez, being part of a cohort with minimal interaction allowed him to develop a habit of prioritizing health over work without feeling any judgment. He wasn’t as worried about whether his own work habits were up to par with his classmates, he said, because he was simply unaware of how the rest of his classmates approached their assignments.

Associate Dean and Associate Professor Kyle Miller, who has occupied his position for 10 years, said that although he thinks it’s improved “incrementally” since he first joined the program, awareness about student wellbeing and health is one of his principal priorities in his current position.

As the first-year studio coordinator for the 2026 graduating class, Miller said impacts of COVID-19 only “exaggerated” the prioritization of wellness.

Miller said he’s been working with the current undergraduate chair and associate professor Daekwon Park as well as meeting with faculty to achieve these goals, and added they are working on providing “extra support” to current third-years who missed out during the pandemic in their freshman year.

Some new initiatives Miller and his team implemented this year include an anonymous feedback poll for first years to reflect on the most rewarding and challenging aspects of the major, as well as a new “studio tutor” program, which provides students struggling to pass with assistance rather than being offered a makeup course. He said the team is looking into expanding this program specifically for the 2026 cohort.

He also recognized the work of student groups, such as the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Council, as giving students a way to communicate their concerns to faculty.

Hong and Leff, who are both involved with the council, cited both issues with communication among different organizations as well as difficulty accessing faculty as hurdles. Hernandez, who was involved in the DEIA Council his first two years, said members also struggled to balance their role with their already rigorous class workload, which caused some members to take on more work than others.

Miller said students involved in non-architecture extracurriculars tend to have a better sense of time management, which first-year students cited as the most challenging part of the program so far in the anonymous feedback poll.

Hernandez also said the school should always make a bigger point to promote trying things outside of the program. As a peer leader for this year’s freshman orientation in the School of Architecture, he said he was pleased with how much the topic was touched on.

“What we talked about a lot with the freshman orientation is, you go to such a big school, it has so many resources, so many clubs, so many sports, so many majors,” he said. “You can do something different every single day, all five years, and you would never do everything at this school.”

Cultivating this sense of community belonging is another value Miller is especially committed to, as it protects mental health, he said.

“I think if every student feels that they belong they will be comfortable, and they will be motivated to achieve success,” Miller said.

Gutierrez, who said Miller’s views also involve de-emphasizing the importance of studio, said they’ve observed pushback from faculty and students who want constant productivity. They said they recognize how deeply rooted the mindset is in the architecture field as a whole, but still support Miller’s aims.

“There needs to be a better balance for the sake of attrition, for the sake of not working your students to the bone,” Gutierrez said. “Personal life needs to be considered more.”

Published on December 8, 2022 at 12:40 am