[music playing] I'm Carolyn Lee, and I'm an architect.

I actually started when I was in grade school.

My sister used to take the House of the Week out of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

I had to do the same thing.

Only I realized, as I kept taking out these floor plans that I was interested in what I could do that was different and better.

Started there, ended up going to architecture school, started working for a firm in Nashville, ended up deciding to go back for my master's and moved to Boston and then moved to Philly, and finally, ended up here in Happy Valley.

To be an architect, you need an accredited degree from the NAAB, and then you have a couple of years of experience working under a registered architect that you need to complete.

So coming out of school, most people are going to go work for a firm.

Big firms are great because you can specialize.

You also get to work on bigger projects because it's a whole lot easier to build a 400,000-square foot building when there's 10 people to work on it versus when you have two.

Smaller firms are great because you get a whole lot more responsibility.

You get to touch everything because there are so few people.

For me, I didn't hang out my own shingle until I had 25 years of experience.

And even now, there are still days where I'm like, I don't know if I know everything I need to know, but I know enough to go ask someone for help when I get to that point.

So I actually started off working for Gresham Smith out of Nashville as one of my co-ops and ended up in their health care studio.

We did emergency room additions.

We did brand new hospitals.

We did imaging cancer centers, you name it, kind of across the entire gamut.

It was great because I really got to dive in and get very specific and really start to understand the processes that went into the space.

It's hard to design an OR without understanding what the surgeon, the nurses, and all of the staff have to go through, plus, how do you flow the patient in and make sure that you don't get cross-contamination and infections and things like that.

What people don't tend to realize is how much legal and code information is in the background to a project.

Guidelines for health care, there's just building codes, plumbing codes, mechanical codes.

It's a lot of reading and a lot of legalese.

I moved my firm from outside of Philadelphia to Happy Valley.

One of the things that I was considering was the fact that I would be able to hire Penn State students to do drafting work for me.

Good for me, good for them.

They get experience towards their intern experience program.

It works out for the client because then they're still getting the work at a better value.

This is just using the existing ramp we come in-- The biggest rewards for me is seeing people actually in the space, seeing them able to use it, and knowing that it's made a difference in their lives, especially with health care work being able to see where someone can now get treatment where they couldn't because there just wasn't the facility for it.