Review of my Research Ideas

I seem to have a strong tendency to do things in waves.  I'll exercise for a while and then stop for a while and then go back into exercising.  Blogging is apparently the same way.  Though I will try to keep it up for a little while.  Just as a brief update since I last wrote I applied to PhD programs in Architecture, got into two, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne and University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.  Decided to go to the later as I was told the professors had more in common with the line of work I was interested in and they had a better deal for me.  Just completed my first semester in the PhD program and now I'm applying for a dual degree with an MBA.

What exactly am I interested in researching?  Part of this has been repeated over the blog entries that I wrote in here but since the wording of it seems to change over time as I get better at explaining it and it may have changed a little I will review.

The following is a little blurb I wrote after meeting with an employee (of my family's company) the other day.

Professions focus on teaching their discipline as an art, the art of medicine, the art of law, or the art of design, just to name a few.  Since the shift away from apprenticeships and towards teaching professions in an academic environment, learning the art of business has been lost to some extent.  More recently many architecture programs have started to require students to take one business course entitled Professional Practice, a crash course on business with one week per topic for example one week on finance, one on marketing, one on strategy, etc.  I believe that these professions would be even more successful with a more developed integration of business throughout all aspects of their program.  This would require a change in the education system away from the current design-as-centerpoint, a term created by my advisor Linda Groat, towards a more integrated education system.  This new system would teach an architect how to be a better project manager, how to be a better team leader, and how to better communicate with clients of similar or vastly different cultures.  With such knowledge in architecture an architect would become a more valuable commodity, having the ability to help the engineer speak to the construction manager or the interior designer, and understanding the needs of the client more.  Similarly if such knowledge was taught in medicine, doctors would be better versed not only in how to speak to a patient but how to treat a patient.  Ideally I would like to teach this knowledge to architects, but if I, for whatever reason, am unable to get a position as an architecture professor I wouldn't mind teaching this to another profession either as a business professor or in some other field.  I also wouldn't be surprised if such a career comes hand in hand with consulting for firms that would like to use this method to make their firm more successful, or their clinic, or whatever field the business may be in.