Praise God!

A+ for Thesis! yay just got my grades, so grateful! After a long, drawn out period of emotional trauma since I first heard news that some members of the architecture department were considering disqualifying us from thesis (allegedly to get back at my thesis advisers for allowing us to do collaborative work), we have finally been vindicated with an awesome grade! God has really brought me from despair and turned the situation around completely, so that not only do I get a good grade, my work is likely to be published by my professor in his firm's monograph, and I do not need to work on a thesis book (which will just collect dust in the library archives) like my peers while still getting the same credit reflected in my official transcript. This is just amazing.

At the same time, I am really disappointed with Cornell School of Architecture's non-progressiveness. To think that the vast majority of today's architectural work arises out of collaboration, and top firms are looking out eagerly for candidates who can work well in teams, why would the top undergraduate architecture program in the US insist on keeping thesis individual? The era of the starchitect is past its prime -- why are we still infatuated with the idea of a single individual changing the direction of architectural practice with a magically conceived thesis project? I guess I'll never know, but I really hope that with the arrival of a new Dean of AAP, our architecture school can at least be a little more forward looking.