Another Dervish Of Interviews

Three more! THREE MORE! For Wednesday I had three interviews lined up, but at least I had already talked to my recruiter the evening before, so I didn’t have to meet with him again on top of it. The first interview started at 10am with McCauley Daye O’Connell. They are a smaller to medium sized firm (30-40 people) and have a decent portfolio of work. I met with one of their founders, Robert McCauley, and had a decent interview with him. He seemed all around a bit less interested than some of my other interviewers. He focused more on the experience that I had with different building types and talked about some of the smaller scale work they were doing, more to what I had previously done. This wasn’t really what I was looking for, but was a reasonable way to get things started. Generally speaking, I am looking to expand the experience that I have had, not just do more of the same.

So, I left that interview with a sort of enh feeling and headed toward my next interview looking for someplace to have lunch. Henry J. Lyons was a good 25 minute walk away in a building that looked a bit like an old, 60’s college administration building. The entrance was barely marked (only text on the glass front door), but once I managed to locate it I found that there were quite a few different restaurants at the next cross street. I found a place to relax for a bit and had a sandwich wrap to tide me over (still suffering a bit in this regard, but I was beginning to think it had more to do with my nerves for interviewing than any part of the relocation).

Close to the proper time (I tended to get to my interviews early – possibly a bit too early in some cases) I headed over and sat in reception for a bit before my interviewer came and took me into a conference room. My interviewer was a younger director in the firm, but someone who was really trying to change the way things were working, taking an older established commercial type firm and trying to put much more of the focus on design. And as it turned out, he seem to be succeeding. He worked in the States for a few years (specifically for a fairly high profile firm called Morphosis), so he had a perspective on where I was coming from and some good experiences in a very design oriented firm.

We started out just talking about design and seemed to connect right away. He brought a few books of drawings in and showed me what he was working on at the moment and looking to build a crew for. One of the projects was a large civic courthouse project that was basically lined-out (IE, well through schematic design), but would need a lot of design development work to flesh out the details. Though my interests and focus tend to lean heavily towards initial ideas and schematic work, the sheer scope of this project, in comparison to anything I had done before, was enough to get me excited. Another project was a residential/commercial mixed use project that was also pretty much through schematics, but would also be an excellent opportunity to get started. He also talked about a few projects just a little ways out that I would likely have the opportunity to get in on right at the start and work on them straight through.

We then looked at my portfolio, sort of keying in on comparable projects I had worked on (which were largely my student works because all of my real world works have been more on a smaller scale), but he seemed to really get into where I was coming from when it came to my design. At the end of the interview I had a really good feeling about this place, specifically my interviewer, the man I would be working for. The whole thing was very positive and it seemed to me that, if he wasn’t held back by company requirements, he would have offered me a job right then. I went away from it feeling like the interview lasted a good deal longer than some of the others and raced off for my final interview of the day.

This turned out to be the firm I am going to be working for.

O’Mahony Pike was a bit out of the heart of Dublin, so I had to jump on the LUAS and catch a ride out there. This was a firm I was very exited to interview with because I had heard a great deal of good things about it from Will, a friend that went to school with Mariah and I, who had been working at OMP in Dublin for a few years before. They had just recently renovated and relocated into an old church (think small cathedral, not Baptist church), which is, intellectually, the coolest building for an architectural office that I can think of (another reason I wanted to interview with this company – I had heard about this from Will). It turns out that they weren’t even close to done with their renovations, so I didn’t get to see the “church of architecture” in a comprehensive state, but I got a preview, which was pretty interesting. The interview, again, went very well. OMP seemed to be doing a lot of things more on par with what I had done in the past, in relation to residential development, and had a strong focus on green technologies and concepts. The feel I got from the people I interviewed was positive and very low key. It struck me as a very comfortable place to work. They also focus a great deal on urban design (which is what Will was doing here), which I would love to learn a lot more about. It was high on my list of places that I was excited about working, though I felt like it might not challenge me as much as some of the other firms in being part of projects that I had never worked on before.

In the end, OMP also passed on me based on a need for someone with a bit more senior experience.

After finishing with this I headed straight home and crashed out, finished with the last of the interviews and hoping to hear some good news soon.