I would like to start out with a word of advice from our interviewee this week: “Do not be afraid. College is the perfect time to…define yourself as a person, a student, a friend, and to find the niche in which you feel most comfortable.”
With those wise words in mind, meet Breanna Sheeler from Perkiomenville, Pennsylvania. By taking her own advice, Breanna has found her niche in PhilaU’s campus as one of our several Rambassadors and an extremely dedicated architecture student. Her love for her program, one which defines her as a student, shines through spectacularly in her tours. This makes sense, as Breanna has learned from the tours “the impact one person can have on the experience of others.” In her words, “…by taking the extra steps to make a student’s tour of campus personal, or by taking the time to have a kind conversation with a worried parent, I know I am both helping our university and those families who are at a critical point in their lives.”
At that critical point in her life, Breanna had set her future sights on PhilaU. “I fell in love,” she told me, “the second I stepped foot on campus. I knew this was the university for me.” In high school Breanna was a member of the Technology Student Association (TSA), which helped her “develop my passion for architecture and construction,” one that led to our architecture program here at PhilaU, which “stood above the rest for their level of professionalism and collaboration.”
I asked her a question that is both difficult and inherently easy all at once: why do you love what you do? In response to that Breanna told me that her “passion for my major stems from my desire to create projects that are bigger than myself. What I mean is, projects that have a beneficial impact on the community and world.” She believes that “sustainability is a necessary component of contemporary design” and that architects have the opportunity to be able to work with the built environment and with the population regarding the impact we all have on nature. Her attention to our environmental impact has been a part of some of her most personally satisfying work so far, as projects that improve “the quality of life and culture within a neighborhood or beyond.” As I hope you can tell from this, Breanna is the type of student whose passion feels as much at home in the buildings of PhilaU as it hopefully will in the rest of the world when she is finished making her mark on our school.
Make sure you keep checking back to Her Campus PhilaU each week to meet more of our inspiring students and professors!