Applying to NC State
John Atkins explains his interest in architecture as the reason he applied to college at NC State.
Interview on 2011-06-14
Transcript
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I had enjoyed drawing in school, I enjoyed mechanical drawing, which I'd taken courses in.
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I don't think I was overly conscious of it but I had enjoyed watching
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certain buildings and their evolution as they went through the construction process in town.
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we always went to Monticello and we'd go every summer and we'd spend hours upon hours there.
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So somehow, I don't know, all this kind of aggregated to the point that I thought that I'd have an interest in architecture.
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I can tell you this, I pretty much misunderstood it, when those aspirations were there, to what the practice is
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but all for the good, by the way, in what the practice is.
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And so I couldn't apply to Duke because Duke didn't have architecture
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and I even thought about applying to civil engineering and then trying to transfer but I didn't want to do that.
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So I applied to NC State,
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and I can't sit here and tell you that there was this great exploration on my part, looking at other schools of architecture,
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and I had the good fortune of being accepted.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
