#468, an international path to licensure
By Heba Bella
Licensed 2019
I’ll start my story a few years before I started the AREs, in Spring of 2012. I made a big decision; I was accepted into the Master of Architecture program at The Washington Alexandria Architecture Center (WAAC) of Virginia Tech, and I decided to go for it. At the time, I was working in Dubai, and had graduated a year earlier from university in a nearby city called Sharjah. In two months, I would need to quit my job, pack my life in a couple of suitcases, and find a new place to live near Alexandria, VA. At the time, I had no idea what AREs even stood for!
Fast-forward to my second year of architecture school, I was elected as the president of the AIAS chapter at my school. That is when I was introduced to some NCARB members and got to know more about the licensing process in the United States. At the time, although I was very involved with AIA/S, I was misinformed that because I didn’t graduate from a NAAB accredited undergraduate program, I would not be able to pursue licensure, even though I was in an accredited graduate program. That, along with the idea that I was just in the US to complete my masters and returning to Dubai or wherever life would take me after, deterred me from creating an NCARB record, nor keep track of my AXP hours, even though I was always working half time or more through-out my masters. Lesson learned. When in doubt, find the answer directly from the source of information!
A year after graduation, I can’t remember exactly how, I realized I could actually get licensed in the US since I graduated from an accredited school. I stayed in Alexandria and I right away opened an NCARB record and tried my best to back-track as many hours as I could. Thankfully the company I work for has a digital system for tracking hours for project management purposes, so I was able to pull out most of my hours, as well as all the hours I spent during my work for AIAS. I still did lose quite a few of hours from two previous jobs (never slack on recording your hours, back-tracking is the worst!).
At the time, one of my African American colleagues got licensed, and she surprised me when she told me she was one of only 300 African American Women currently licensed in the country (source). That was a strong motivational force for me to want to pursue this even more!
I took my first test not so long after that, Site Planning and Design. I think that was the very first time that I failed a test that I had studied so hard for! The failure took a big toll on me. It put me off for a while and it was six months until my second attempt. At the time, the AREs were transitioning from 4.0 to 5.0, and I decided to take the five-exam route. The deadline for the transition was a good driver for me to study again. And so I did. I passed all three of the ARE 4.0 exams that year. Although my husband (also an architect) and the office I work at provided me with an abundance of 4.0 study material, it was hard to transition to ARE 5.0 with no-one around me having tried it yet.
I took an unintentional year break. The project I was working on was getting extremely demanding, I got engaged, and married that year.
Right after our honeymoon, I decided that this was the time. I gathered up all the study material that I could get my hands on and started slowly getting back to a study routine. Of course, it is much harder getting back to studying after a long break. The way ARE 5.0 exams are structured is very different from ARE 4.0. It is in a sense more general and the amount of subjects covered in the exams is very broad. Within three months I had made my first attempt on Project Planning and Design. It was Ramadan and I was fasting most of the month that lead to the exam, that is from sunrise to sunset, and yes, I fast from water as well. I had to go to work really early so I could leave the office at a decent time to study before I broke my fast (I am one of those people that become much slower after eating dinner). It was really tough with how busy work was at the time, and the exam did not go well. But this time I knew better, I wasn’t going to let that delay me any longer.
I scheduled the next exam a couple of months later. Since I wasn’t satisfied with the study material I had, I decided to go back to general architectural textbooks, and I found that it suited the 5.0 exams much better. I also signed up for every practice test service or video tutorial I could get my hands on. I discovered the vast amount of free video material that is available on YouTube and in written articles! It was eye-opening to see just how much architectural study materials are really out there! I put my all into it, and took Project Development and Documentation, and this time it was a pass! I right away scheduled PPD within two weeks, it was the day before my husband’s birthday, so I decided not to look at the results right away, but a couple of days later, I got the happy news! I was all done!
I can’t say that this journey was easy, but I also can’t say that I stopped my life for it. It takes a lot of dedication and support for good end results. I couldn’t have done all this without a supportive partner taking care of dinners and washing the dishes which left my evenings free to focus on studies, and not to mention late night flashcard sessions! Nor could I have found good study material suggestions as I did without fellow study-mates I found on ARE Facebook groups. It takes a lot of psychological courage to get back on your feet and try again after a fail, and actually the last two exams I took I scheduled on weekends so I wouldn’t have to tell anybody but my husband. I could focus solely on studying and not worry about the shame of having to tell everybody around me at work in case I didn’t pass–it helped! I know most people dread these exams, but I found them very helpful, I learned many things studying for them which were not covered in school or touched upon at work. Ultimately the spirit in which we enter this route makes all the difference: is it just to get the piece of paper that we frame at the end, or is it to become better architects, I chose the latter.
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