I am a junior in high school, I have a 3.2 gpa, what can I do as someone who wants to be an architect?Answered
Junior in High School. GPA is 3.2, Black, Drawing Skills, have interest in Math related topic, low psat score; 750 total
Earn karma by helping others:
5 answers
Architecture school comes in 3 flavors.
1. 4 year degrees where you have to go to grad school for 2 more to be an architect.
2. 5 year accelerated degrees
3. 3 1/2 graduate school degrees.
Since you are not the strongest student, I don't think you have chance at 5 year schools like Cornell, Syracuse, SciArc, Rice, Cooper Union, VTech, CalState SLO. Most of those admits are A students with 1450 plus SAT, 32 ACT test scores.
I think you have a better chance at going to a 4 year college specializing architecture like Ball State, UMinnesota, UColorado, ASU, UArizona, Texas A&M, UofOregon, OhioState, Boston Arch. College.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_school_in_the_United_States
Or just going to any 4 year college and applying to Architecture School in your senior year. The best schools are grad schools and they would be Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Yale, UPenn, Princeton.
I think the 3 tips I can give you is.
1. Get your grades up
2. Take more Math and Sciences
3. Work on your drawing and art portfolio
Good luck.
Hi @PandaLanda! I completely agree with what @CameronBameron said. My main recommendations are for you to get your GPA up in the next couple of semesters, aim for a good score on the SAT/ACT, and continue to develop your interest in math and possibly join a club or initiative that helps you build those engineering and math skills that will eventually be useful in your career. I also recommend maintaining a portfolio because some architecture programs may ask for that when applying.
Here are some helpful articles from our blog:
https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-become-an-architect-steps-to-take-from-high-school/
https://blog.collegevine.com/should-you-major-in-architecture/
Hope that helps!
Contact your state chapter of American Institute of Architects and see if they have a high school mentoring program. https://www.aia.org/find-chapter There is a huge interest in promoting the field of architecture for BIPOC across the country. The profession depends on mentorship to pass down knowledge, as so much is learned in the field and not from a book. Most chapters have practicing architects that volunteer their time to reach out to students of all ages.
I do want to emphasize that there are many other architecture schools out there besides the prestigious schools that were mentioned by another poster. A recently 5 year BArch accredited school is the Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis. They are a small technology/vocational school with affordable tuition and caring instructors. https://dunwoody.edu/design/
Good Luck!
A lot of art schools have really good BFA architecture programs, like RISD or Parsons. If you plan on applying to an art school, start working on your portfolio right away. I would have saved so much time and stress had I started during my junior year.
Putting your time into AP classes and taking electives as pass fail will really help to get your GPA up.
Your chance of acceptance
Your chancing factors
Community Guidelines
To keep this community safe and supportive:
- Be kind and respectful!
- Keep posts relevant to college admissions and high school.
- Don’t ask “chance-me” questions. Use CollegeVine’s chancing instead!