Nina Isabelle Onia is a third-year student who is studying Interior Architecture at Sacramento State. She is currently enrolled in INTD 151 and INTD 153: two upper-division courses that focus on learning skills in architectural project development. Nina and her peers in these courses are each working on their semester-long project: designing a cannabis dispensary. They have to accommodate the site in Southern Sacramento and apply a retail program to the pre-existing building. Nina plans to further polish her cannabis dispensary project for her resume.
Before reaching this point, Nina had several prerequisites to take in her first two years at Sacramento State. The pandemic was an obstacle in planning this schedule because a majority of courses were required to happen in person. Despite these drawbacks, Nina managed to take most of her prerequisites online. Her first year included several introductory courses in design history and architecture. Her second year was more cluttered. Due to scheduling issues within the discipline, Nina was allowed to take the upper-division architectural history course INTD 123 alongside her prerequisites. She also took INTD 96—a course that had to be taken to move on to the upper division—in the Summer 2022 semester and learned the basics of AutoCAD and SketchUp.
Nina’s ideal job is to work at an architecture firm. She admires how the discipline of architecture combined art with logic and a physical structure in a social setting. Ideally, Nina would become a residential architect and design houses, focusing on a client’s wants and needs for their place of living. Nina knows what the job is like; she has job shadowed at the architecture firm Jeffrey DeMure + Associates during her senior year of high school (Fall and early Winter 2020). At JD+A, Nina oversaw several computer-aided design (CAD) techs, designers, and project managers. She watched these professionals skim through code books and material samples in binders, pin up printed copies of the plans to mark up mistakes, and edit their designs on computers. Nina has applied what she learned at JD+A to her college courses and plans to get an internship in the near future.