How much does an Architecture student work?


     Anyone who has ever met an Architecture student will have heard them complain (or brag?) about the long hours spent in studio, about the lack of sleep — about them working all the time. This has all been described, rather wittily, in a letter by Annie Choi

At the beginning of the Thesis year, I decided to find out how much an Architecture student really works — by recording my own progress during the final year of Architecture School. To do this, I used Toggl —  a simple time–tracker (developed in Estonia!) that allowed me to concentrate on my work and find out how long I spent on each task. I decided to record the time doing active work only — all the discussions, lunches, critical self–reflection, ping–pong matches in studio were omitted to reveal the time being productive — which in turn made me more conscious, and, I hope, more efficient at using this precious resource.

The result — 2535 hours of active work — is split by week in the following chart: 







With the majority of the academic work taking place over a period of 33 weeks, the average weekly workload was then a bit less than 77 hours — which translates to an average of 11 hours of active work per day, including all the holidays, week–ends and days recovering after all–nighters. Ouch. 

To be fair, not all of this time was spent on academic projects — part–time work, side projects and website management were also included in this record; however all in all this made up an intensive, exhausting year — with little time to spare for anything else. This is why my original ambition of sharing the Thesis development online proved rather unrealistic, and this is why it's probably just better to check out the finished project that consumed all 2535 hours here