Why I do what I do, and why I love it too...

Thanks to my mom, I was lucky to travel and fly to different countries
at a very early age. Nothing beats the build-up of anticipation
and excitement while waiting at the NAIA departure lounge for boarding.
I would baon a steno notebook, pencils and crayons and draw the planes
I see on the tarmac. Later on I would look them up on the in-flight
magazines and list down the plane's specifics... length, wingspan, max
speed, etc.



During that time, most of my classmates were drawing the Ninja Turtles
or the X-men, or the Dragonball-Z characters, while there I was
drawing tubes with rows of holes along their sides, wings, fins
and clouds. As I got older, my drawings got better, they were pretty
decent, except for the clouds... because I figure I couldn't really
draw a cloud because clouds don't really hold a shape.



I still remember my first plane ride, it was a trip to San Francisco,
and because my mom was an airline employee and we were flying on
standby and were forced to ride on the flight attendant jumpseats. I
still remember the wonder and awe I felt as a kid as the lumbering
747-200 took off. I remember asking my mom about how the plane flew,
and her answer was... "Its designed to fly, anak."



As I got to late grade school, I figured that it would be great to be a
pilot, but I wasn't so sure about being a driver for huge amounts of
people, bringing them to places they've probably never been before, but
driver nonetheless. (No disrespect to pilots) Besides, I dont have
a very good set of eyes, and back then I couldn't swim well (hanggang
ngayon naman). So I decided I wanted to be an Aircraft
Designer/Aeronautical Engineer instead.



With that decision, I was pretty confident, but then I started asking
my elders on how to go about it. What course will I have to apply for
in college? What college? What companies I could work for? That sort of
thing. But as the answers came, it became more apparent that its a dead
end for me, at least locally... the prospects for that field weren't as
promising as I would have wanted.



On the side, the burgeoning nerd in me, started to dabble into
computers, starting with batch files, dos, windows and BASIC. When I
ran into my good friend JM, my learning curve suddenly got accelerated,
with the two of us coding in Pascal, some C, eventually Visual Basic,
and some really shallow Assembly. It was fun, because, I could actually
make the computer do something, it empowered me and showed me that I
could do something that a lot of my peers couldn't. But its the same
empowerment that kinda made me a geek/nerd, albeit a really
unprototypical version of one.



As I hit seventh grade (a waste of time by the way...) my dad (who's a
practicing architect) suggested... "Anak, you're into computers, why
don't you study AutoCAD?" and I did take the idea up. It was all fun for
me, because it was just like programming, I was able to do something
on-screen that not very many people back then could. (Case-in-point,
AutoCAD was still on release 11 back then, now its already dropped the
release numbers, but if you count the versions, its already at release
19).



So that summer, I learned CAD, and immediately after, joined the
office, where I was a saling-pusang draftsman/encoder. I was doing a
set of marketing plans, when my dad came over and asked me if I wanted
to join him on-site to check the building. I said, sure, why not? As we
got down the car and enterred the construction site, which was a
prototypical ballet of debris, noise, cranes and workers; he lead me to
the floor I was drawing on CAD and showed me the walls that I was
encoding.



I came closer and touched the walls. And right then I felt the
creator's high. The rush of adrenalin brought about by knowing that you
had a hand in building and making that thing real. I thought to myself,
if this is how I feel touching a wall that my dad thought of, I wonder
how it would feel if I was already touching something I designed?



Thats the moment. when and where I decided to be an architect.



Not a far cry from a programmer, except that I'm no longer creating
things on the screen, but designing real, tangible, usable structures.



Nor very different from a pilot, making heavy things float and soar up
to the sky, while at the same time bringing people to places they've
never been to.



That's why I do what I do.



I'm at a crossroads, and I hope and pray everything falls into place.



Lord, Your Will Be Done!