Parents, professors, friends and commencement speaker Cynthia Weese, cofounder and principal of Weese Langley Weese of Chicago, were on hand to celebrate the class of 2008 when they walked on May 10. An informal survey before the ceremony found that at least 20 graduates have secured jobs, a handful will go to graduate school next fall, and some ambitious road trips are in the works (need a ride to Montana, California, Colorado or Denmark?).

For the 20+ students seeking your first internship: be sure to check out the school's firms and jobs pages, now back online. 

For alumni looking for fresh talent: we've made some improvements to the firms and jobs pages – see Networking for details.

To all of the class of 2008: congratulations, good luck, and keep in touch!

In her free time, Chris Hilker enjoys riding her new horse Jessie.

When School of Architecture students contemplate a crisp image of the sacred circle at Stonehenge glowing on a screen in a dark auditorium, they benefit from the knowledge and organizational prowess of Christine Hilker, director of the school’s C. Murray Smart Media Center. Her work is both visual and largely invisible (only a fraction of the school’s students have found the center, perched high in the former stacks of Vol Walker Hall), but it has not gone unnoticed. Recently Hilker was honored with the 2008 Distinguished Service Award from the Visual Resources Association in recognition of her 27 years of service in the profession.

“It was a big honor,” Hilker said, relaxed in her light-filled aerie lined with art, books and plants. Though she appreciates the recognition, it’s the support she has found within the organization that has been most meaningful through the years. “Here on campus, there aren’t many people who do what I do. You really need colleagues to bounce ideas off of,” she said.

Sounding boards are especially important when you’re participating in the late 20th century sea change from analog to digital. When Hilker arrived at the School of Architecture in 1979, she found some 65,000 slides, a few reel-to-reel tapes and no catalog of any kind. She bought a video camera and a computer and got busy, building the collection to 80,000 slides, 1,000 videos and 35,000 digital images. These days, instead of filing slides, student workers spend most of their time scanning them for inclusion in Hilker’s digital database, which she plans to offer campuswide beginning this summer.

“The trend is toward sharing and pooling resources,” she said. “Faculty shouldn’t have to be image managers – it’s a lot of work to organize and keep track of them.” With the digital databases now available, professors can park the shoebox of slides in the attic and clear space-hogging digital images from their hard drives.

“We are lucky to have Chris Hilker, who has very capably ushered the school’s visual resources into the digital era,” said Jeff Shannon, dean of the School of Architecture. “Designers learn from the work of other designers, and Chris facilitates this process of learning by seeing.” read more

Have you:

• landed a new job

• wrapped a project

• won a prize

• or been out of touch for a while?

We want to hear from you – and share your news with the world (at least, the 3000+ alumni and friends who read Re:View magazine).

Please send your latest news to Kendall Curlee by Friday, June 20. If you've got some high-res, print quality images of your work (at least 300 dpi) we'd like to see those too.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The firms and jobs pages on our web site are back – and they're better:

• Firms may now update their own directory listings and manage job postings.

• Users will soon be able to search by firm type (very helpful, with more than 250 firms in the directory!)

Note that your firm must be entered on the firms page in order to post a job opening on the jobs page.

You may create a new firm listing and an account by going to firms page and clicking on "Create a firm" (just follow the prompts).

Firms already in the directory will need to create an account to edit their listing or post a new job. Firm representatives should have received an email this week with username and password information. If your firm did not, or if you have any questions, please contact Kendall Curlee.