Ready, Set, Architect! is not just an architectural career handbook. It is the living proof that you can make it out of architecture school alive and thriving. Better still, you can have your design career and move past it, too.

Ready, Set, Architect! is part career guide, part memoir, and part activity journal that is bound and determined to show you how to become an architect and come out the other side with options for every 2.0 version of yourself.

Jane explores the antithetical Gen-X movement of firm-hopping and talks about the only two jobs she has had in her adult life. Yes, only two! At the same time, she enlists the help of friends, past and present, to dive deep into their own journey to share their wouldas, shouldas, and couldas.

After spending five years in design school, with the student loan debt to match, architects-to-be find themselves subsisting on ramen and very little sleep to get very little pay and zero recognition for their efforts. Transitioning to something else is almost perverse and you can feel the admonishment from a distant relative wagging their forefinger and squeaking, “I told you, you shoulda gone into business.”

By the end of the book, listeners will admire the journey of the architectural traveler and revel in their skill sets, and for once in their nascent career, junior architects will understand the paths that remain to be forged ahead with vigor and enthusiasm, not guilt or trepidation.