<p>You are not correct LA. The money is there if you open your own practice. I opened my own practice in New York City when I was 28 having completed the minimum 3 year apprenticeship. If you get good summer internships and you get a top notch apprenticeship, there is no need to spend 10 years working for someone else. IMO.</p>
<p>I am not a live-to-work person and I never was–not in school and not in the New York offices I worked in. Phillip Johnson had a syaing: “If you can’t do it in eight hours, you can’t do it.” That’s my philosophy too. Once or twice a year we have a three week haul to produce some major set of drawings for a multi-million dollar project, but other than that, we live a cruisy lifestyle which includes 6 to 8 weeks of vacation every year.</p>
<p>All high paying professions require work, however. Baby investments bankers, accountants and lawyers sell their 20 something souls to get those six figure salaries. We didn’t have to do that. In fact, we awarded ourselves a four month Rome Prize when we were 26.</p>
<p>There is plenty of time to make money. Enjoy your 20s, get out and see the world, develop your intellect and your ambition. Once you hve children, you will want more money. Money will not be a problem for you if you develop your business properly.</p>
<p>Like composing, archtiecture is an old man’s profession. You get better and better commisions as you get older. We are nearly 50 and we have gotten ridiculously wonderful commisions in the apst year–with even crazier ones on the horizon. The jump in scale can only be attributed to our age. If we stay with it until we are in our 70’s --like Johnson, Foster, meier, Corbusier, Wright, Pei, Polshek–we will be very very wealthy people.</p>