Brett Taylor
Brett Taylor
Brett Taylor came to Norwich after attending Marine Corps boot camp, which meant the cadet lifestyle was not foreign to him. During his senior year, he served as the Cadet Colonel — the highest rank in the Corps of Cadets — graduating in 1997 with a degree in architecture. He is currently an Associate with Skidmore Owings & Merrill in Chicago.
Norwich combined the two things in my life that I wanted to do — be at a military school and study architecture. I was really sold on Norwich the day I arrived on campus. We attended an April open house but there was a late snowstorm. Now, I came from Salt Lake, so snow wasn’t a big deal, but the snow added to the intimacy of Norwich. My family and I flew into Boston and rented a car. From the moment we showed up, the atmosphere was fantastic; there was a fire in the fireplace at Roberts Hall, and there were cadets there in their winter uniforms, boots bloused. I knew I wanted to attend Norwich in the first thirty seconds. I talked with students, and they had a great attitude, an air of “Do you have what it takes? If you do, you might just make it. You might just be tough enough.”
I was the Cadet Colonel in my final year at Norwich. It was a tremendous effort to balance my responsibilities in the Corps of Cadets, which is nearly a full-time job, with the workload of being an architecture major. To be honest, the biggest challenge is being able to discipline your friends. That’s the unique thing about Norwich: unlike other military schools where you have advisors, the Corps of Cadets leads itself, and the University administration remains relatively hands-off.
In the architecture world where I work today, the pace and workload can be overwhelming, but I’ve been able to manage my tasks in large part because of the skills I learned at Norwich.
~ Brett Taylor
I was a member of the Military Police Company, which was difficult; nobody [likes] the job of writing up a buddy for not being in formation. That was a big lesson in integrity; even when your friend is not doing his job, you have to what is right. When you get out in the corporate world, you're still managing friends. You might go to a bar with a buddy from the office to have a beer and watch and football game, and two days later you have to discipline him for missing a deadline.
The architecture program at Norwich is amazing. I’m always shocked when I meet other architecture graduates from other programs that haven’t had the challenging and rewarding experience that I had at Norwich. When I meet people from other schools, I see that my skill sets are almost always superior. Part of that is the class size, but it’s also the quality of the professors and the education. Norwich’s location in Vermont is also a big plus. It’s a great mix of being in a rural area but also having access to urban areas with great architecture opportunity. Being close to cities like Montreal and Boston provided fantastic opportunities.
In the architecture world where I work today, the pace and workload can be overwhelming, but I’ve been able to manage my tasks in large part because of the skills I learned at Norwich. Norwich Cadet life forces you to manage your time and set priorities. In architecture, clients & managers will often give me a task and need an accurate assessment of when it can be completed. Because of Norwich, I can always give them a solid estimate and never miss a critical deadline.
