By Sarah Skalitzky

In the spring of 2009, I didn’t truly understand what was going on in the world. I’d heard the names Bernie Madoff and Fannie Mae in the news but didn’t know who they were. They said the economy was bad, whatever that meant. I knew that people were losing their retirement savings, their houses, and their jobs, but none of that really mattered to me.

I was almost two years out of college, working in my first architecture job, living in a one-bedroom apartment on the East side of Madison, and dating Jeremy. I didn’t have retirement savings or a house to lose, and I was already planning to leave my job and return to graduate school in the fall.

Nonetheless, I was still shocked when I got an email from HR one morning asking to talk to me later that day about my position in the firm. I turned to my cube-mate and said, a little too loudly, “I think I’m getting fired today!”

When my lease was up on my apartment, I moved across town into Jeremy’s house, where I would live for the summer until moving back to Milwaukee for school. My summer of unemployment was lonely – my friends were all still working, and I spent my days broke, in my PJ’s, watching TV on the couch.

The graduate program was only two years, and when I graduated, I moved back to Madison. I wanted to stay in Milwaukee, but it wasn’t a good time for Jeremy to sell his house, and the job market in Milwaukee was still non-existent. I landed a job at a small firm in Madison, a job that, for various reasons, I thought would be my dream job. I was one of the few in my graduating class to get hired before graduation and start working right away. I thought I was one of the lucky ones.

I didn’t know then about the long-term impact the Great Recession would have on the architecture industry, and the effect on my career and my life. As an industry, we lost knowledge when older employees were forced into early retirement; we lost managers and mentors when mid-level architects were let go, often to find work in other fields in order to support their families, and never to return to architecture; young professionals and jobless graduates who also found their way on alternate paths, leaving an enormous hole in the workforce.

I didn’t know that the competitive nature of both my education and the job market at the time would lead me to years of personal scrutiny, perfectionism, internal pressure, and constant stress.

I didn’t know that being one of the few at my level with a job in 2011 meant that I would become highly valuable in a few years, hitting that sweet spot of 3-5 years of experience that every firm was looking for, and there weren’t enough of us to fill. I didn’t know that being that valuable wasn’t actually a good thing, that it meant that you had to do more work because you didn’t have a team to support you. It meant that you would be given more and more responsibility. It meant that you had to advance quickly, and soon enough you’d have your own mountain of work to complete and a new workforce of young professionals that you would be expected to mentor, having little experience of being mentored yourself, and now having to figure out what it meant to be a mentor.

I didn’t know that I would be miserable, that my health would suffer, and that I would decide to leave before I turned 40.

No, I didn’t know any of these things. I just thought I was one of the lucky ones.

On my first day of work at my new job, I wore gray dress pants, a white short-sleeve top, and a cute cardigan. I walked into the office excited to start my life and reboot my career. I was welcomed by my boss, who seemed happy to have me there. After a brief tour, I sat at my desk made of plywood, a computer on one side and a drafting table on the other, and started to settle in. Today was the first day of the rest of my life. Today was going to be great.

© 2024 Sarah Skalitzky

Sarah Skalitzky – Madison, WI
Architect | Writer | Musician | Quilter/Crafter | Gardener
Daughter | Sister | Wife | Friend | Dog Mom