Seeing life from the back side

“Life is a runaway train you can’t wait to jump on.” -Sugarland

Funny how some songs just play on the radio at that perfect moment. I’m in the car, making the five hour drive back home from a weekend of college visits with my daughter – our last child. She is a high school junior ready to be done with high school and so ready to move on to college. Or, perhaps put more accurately; so ready to just move on.

The song, Already Gone, by country music group Sugarland, plays over and over in my mind. It just seems to describe where my daughter is right now. If I am really honest, it describes exactly where I was when I was her age. That’s what makes this so bittersweet.
She is, as I was at that age, interested in the arts, architecture and photography. She is in some ways too immature to be heading off to college, yet in many ways way too mature for the goings-on of high school girl drama. I have been proud of her for decisions she has made and frustrated with her youthful self-centeredness. All the while, I see reflections of myself in her approach to life at this age.

I remember how desperately I wanted to escape the confines of my childhood hometown, to explore the world even if that meant going to a university a mere five hours away.

This weekend of college tours included visits to four schools, one of them my alma mater. This school’s Junior Days program, designed to introduce high school juniors to college life, included attending classes, seeing dorms, eating with students and walking through campus during class breaks. Along with this very well-choreographed program put on by the university to immerse these kids into a day in the life of a college freshman, we spent considerable time in the fine arts and architecture buildings – the very building where I studied architecture 30 years ago.

The studios where I spent endless hours and days working on projects looked remarkably similar to when I was there. Her fascination with the level of projects these students were working on was eclipsed only by her desire to see more and more of their work. To say she was energized by the experience is a gross understatement.

Retracing the paths I walked, seeing places where I lived and studied, and being reminded of stories of college life long gone left me in a real melancholy state. I was excited for my daughter, for her excitement about the next stage of her life, for the experiences she would have and the people she would meet. I was excited about the possibilities for her career choice and where that would take her in life.

However, I couldn’t help but wonder where my life’s path would have led had I stuck with architecture and not transferred to journalism and marketing. Would I have been that custom home designer that I really wanted to be when I started college? If I knew then what I know now, would I have made the same decision?

At some point on that drive back, between listening to my daughter’s impressions of her college experience, answering her questions about college life as best I could and watching her nod off from exhaustion, I realized that the place I am right now would not have been possible without the college experience I had.

The combination of architecture, journalism and marketing plays perfectly into what I do every day. I call on all three on a regular basis. I love having strategic marketing conversations with our clients and prospective clients, helping them with their face-to-face marketing goals and measurements. I still sketch ideas on napkins or my always-handy quad pad, turn them into designs and sit down with our production team and wade into construction drawings. And occasionally, I get to do some writing.

I love ribbing my architect buddies about how long they have to wait to see a finished project. I get to see our work in its finished state from bare ground in several days, and if I don’t like it, we can take it down several days later and change it before putting it back up again. Try that with your new custom home.

See you on the show floor.

Jim Obermeyer has been in the tradeshow industry 29 years, both as a corporate tradeshow manager and exhibit house executive. He is a partner in the tradeshow and event marketing firm Reveal. He can be reached at jobermeyer@revealexhibits.com.