Landscape Design Intensive Allowed for Quick Career Change
Posted in Learning Experiences, People on May 12th, 2009 by Plant Talk – 2 Comments |
Jay Petrow, a former student in Continuing Education’s Landscape Design program, is owner of PetrowGardens Landscape Design. He will talk about his path to becoming a landscape designer at a free Career Information Session on Landscape Design, Floral Design, and Horticultural Therapy tomorrow, May 13, 6–8 p.m., in the Arthur and Janet Ross Lecture Hall. |
I was an eight-year-old boy growing up in Forest Hills, Queens, when my parents bought a country house. The house was overrun by thickets of wisteria, poison ivy, and weeds, but I used to go out there and just hack away and try to reshape the landscape. I believe that’s where my love for working on the land originated.
When I got to college I studied the natural sciences and art. After graduating I became a magazine art director, working for Time, Sports Illustrated, and Business Week for 25 years. Eventually, I reached that age when you need to figure out what you really want to do when you grow up. I started a personal exploration and one day everything came together. I decided that landscape design was the perfect match for all of my skills, experience, and interests. I could capitalize on my design and drawing skills, my natural science education, and my love for landscaping.
I looked around for different landscape design programs and settled on the program offered by NYBG. It would be difficult to go through the program one course at a time for me since I was living in Connecticut, working in Manhattan, and had a full-time family life. So I gravitated toward the Summer Intensive program. I managed to talk my employer into letting me take all of my vacation time at once.
To learn more about Jay’s career-changing experience… read more »