My First Jury

Jury is not just an exam that you will only experience at university. It is actually a representation of an interior architect, presenting their project to their clients. It is an experiment that we will be doing over and over in our worklife. So I think we should be taking it seriously starting from our student life. As students, it is the only place where you can get the rewards of all your hard work and effort. You will probably be sleepless for days, trying to make it on time, working on every detail in your drawings or models. That 8–10 minutes is all you have got to present your weeks of work. So you need to use it right.

Firstly, and in my opinion, the most important one, is that you need to show that you care about this meeting. Even though you are tired to death and trying to survive on two hours of sleep – which is a very rare thing, most people won't sleep at all, your attire should be neat, clean and professional. And when I say proffesional I mean smart casual outfits. In this way, you can be seen professionally but also comfortable at the same time. The most important thing is that it shows that you care about your own project. Which makes them care about your project too.

Secondly, do not ever, never argue with a jury. We are talking about people who know much more than us, who are experienced and versed. Our aim should be to try to get as many and different comments as possible. So that we can improve our projects according to those comments. Of course, you may say something about your thought of design for a jury comment, but my advice is that you only try to explain yourself for once. If they still insist on that point, it means that you need to check in, and maybe revise it. 

Another thing that I can recommend is that you need to have a pencil in your hand in a jury so you can take notes about their comments on your poster or a notebook, according to your preference. We can all forget the topics that were mentioned with that stress and excitement, so this will help you to remember all the points that were made by the jury while you are revising your project. More importantly, it will give the sense that you care about the thoughts of the jury.

Lastly, your presentation skills and poster design are really important criteria which most of us ignore most of the time. If you do your presentation successfully, it may allow you to present a very bad and incomplete project in a very good way, but you can also leave a very bad impression of a very perfect project just because your presentation and poster are inadequate. Which are the topics we will talk about in upcoming blogs.

Stay tuned!