It’s that time of year again… Superstudio!
All the cogs are in motion to bring you the biggest event on the SONA Calendar. Superstudio is a 24 hours ‘ideas’ design competition that runs simultaneously in every state and territory in Australia. Students will compete in groups of 3 in response to a brief that is kept confidential until 7pm AEST on Friday 2 August, around the country.

In the past the creative director has been an elected student, last year we decided to change things up a little and invited ARM to curate the brief. This year we have 4 Creative Directors who come from architecture, design, and art based professions who are all of indigenous descent.

Why would you want to compete? Well, the prize for the national winners is flights and entry to the Venice Biennale courtesy of BlueScope Steel as well as a nice bit of media coverage – just google last years winners!

What skills do you need? The ability to conceptualise! As I said before Superstudio is an ideas competition so it is your idea that matters not how well you know CAD or Photoshop! This makes the competition accessible to everyone at every year level! Superstudio is about creating studio culture.

We encourage you to consider forming a group with colleagues from different uni’s and year levels as no single Uni or year level has any advantage or disadvantage! Also it is fun! If you want to keep up to date with the event information as it is released be sure to join the Facebook event.

I hope to see you at SuperStudio! – Register Now

Sarah Lynn Rees
Vice President Competitions

A new series of short and sweet episodes available online to members. Agony Architects – where some of Australia’s wisest and most amusing architects answer the tricky questions. We hope their words of wisdom will answer some of the questions university cant, helping you learn what is really involved in getting a job in architecture, from what you put in your folio, to how you make your application stand out, from the low of rejection, to the high of acceptance and then what it takes to get the job done.

Agony Architects charts the do’s and don’ts of preparing job applications, creating a folio, the no positions vacant emails, the interview emails and those first days in the office on the job. Agony Architects provides the inside word on what it takes to make it ‘in the real world’ of architecture.

Episode 1 – Preparation
Episode 2 – The Folio
Episdoe 3 – The Interview
Episdoe 4 – Acceptance/Rejection
Episode 5 – The Job

Access to the Agony Architect series requires your individual Institute membership number and password. If you are yet to renew your SONA membership you can do so now by clicking here. If you have any questions or need assistance please contact the membership team membership@architecture.com.au

Here is a little promo video we put together so you can check out Agony Architects.

Hi there and welcome back to the uni semester!

My name is Danny Brookes and I’ll be representing you as SONA president this year. It’s a privilege to be involved in this student organisation and I hope you too see benefit in the many local and nationwide events that we organise.

We have new SONA reps at each of our universities this year. They have plenty of energy and will be organising some great initiatives – so make sure you get involved. I’d also like to say a big welcome to our new National Manager Georgie Greenland, she’ll be keeping us organised and on-budget throughout the year!

If you have any great ideas for SONA this year I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time!

representatives from across Australia to attend a training workshop in Melbourne. Our reps learnt about the range of SONA initiatives we’ll be introducing in 2012, and we also planned a calendar of events.