Chuck DePrima

I graduated from college ready to design the world but the economy in 1995 had other plans for me. After a year of commercial fishing in Alaska and working as a 3rd shift paramedic I finally landed a job with a civil engineering firm....as a receptionist but I was just happy to be positioned to enter the design profession. After 5 years of maximizing commercial land by designing big box retail and industrial sites I was ready for change. I jumped ship to work in the municipal environment as a planner for the largest municipal parks department in my state. One event led to another and after 7 years I was the head of the department and my job existed entirely in the political and administrative realm. Another bad economy finally caught up with me and my position as director was eliminated through a consolidation into another department.

Two and a half years of unemployment has provided me with the amazing opportunity to raise my son full time and reassess my career path and rediscover what I enjoy most......designing. I've met some amazing people along the way but I realized that landscape architecture had changed a lot while I spent the better part of 7 years navigating the murky poilitcal waters as a public administrator .

Now I am trying to take what I have learned during the 15 years since college graduation from the private and public environments to (re)define myself as a professional, as a designer, as a Landscape Architect.