Advice Please

You said... “I'm looking for a career that will afford me respect, money, and eventually the ability to be my own boss. How does urban planning fare in these respects?”

If money is on your want list, I’d advise you to pick another profession.

As for being your own boss, you need to have a good head for business, plus the ability to sell yourself and your services, regardless of your profession.

As professionals go, planners don’t make a lot (it’s not rocket science… any reasonably articulate person can perform most planning work with little training). The majority of planners work in municipal planning departments at whatever the local salary scale is for civil servants. Other planners work at consulting firms for similar pay but less job security. Outside of urban design, which is really an architecture-based profession unto itself, private sector planning consultants nowadays mainly produce various kinds of environmental impact studies and reviews, mandated by the public sector, especially in California where this has become something of a cottage industry for consulting firms (just check the job ads for planners in California and try to find any which do not require prior CEQA experience).

I didn’t mention LEED… it seems to be the hot area for jobs at the moment. To me in terms of everyday work, it’s just a variation on CEQA… somewhat repetitious work to assure that a project is LEED-certified, which means in California, at least, every project will now need to be CEQAfied and then LEEDified too… so hence a new profit center for the consultants.

Please do not misunderstand me… I don’t mean to ridicule the importance of environmental or sustainability considerations in planning… they are important and somebody has to do it. Rather, I’m just advising that you ask yourself whether you personally want to spend your workdays involving yourself in what is (mostly) repetitious and somewhat mundane work with little prospect that it will lead to anything more exciting in your career.

There are, of course, other things you could do with your planning degree… work for a real estate developer, for example, with the added benefit that there are better prospects for money here. Many planners, especially those in academia or government, don’t understand real estate development, which is a shame because that is where in reality many planning decisions get made. (Personally, I think that all planners should be required to spend perhaps a minimum of 5 years in the private sector before they become entrenched at City Hall or on a university campus.)

Other possibilities for a planning career include working outside the USA where, depending on the locale, prospects for money, respect, excitement, adventure, and personal satisfaction, are somewhat better than spending eight hours everyday in some windowless cubicle at your local City Hall writing up zoning variances or reviewing environmental impact reports.

I speak from experience. Windowless cubicles were never for me… my very first full-time job out of grad school was 3 years in Bermuda (where my office had a window), and I’ve worked off-and-on outside the USA ever since. Presently I work in Dubai (my fourth time in this part of the world), where… yes… yes… some might say that I am prostituting myself to greed and outlandish notions of architectural taste. On the latter, one could argue endlessly, but the money in Dubai is good (by US standards) and the excitement factor (as planning jobs go) also quite good. Dubai is one of the few places, for example, where even a relatively junior-level planner can get directly involved in some pretty big and exciting urban design projects.

You need to think about what interests you personally, because if you choose to do something which really excites you (sorry, I know this sounds like a cliché), then success, along with money and all the rest, will come naturally.

I have a Masters degree in Community Planning and Development and currently work as an Urban Planner for a small city. The Director of my department is an Attorney. When I started graduate school, I had also considered a law degree or a dual degree in law and urban planning. If I could have done it again, I would have pursued the law degree or the dual degree rather than the Planning degree. Don’t get me wrong...I love my work as Planner but most of what you learn as a Planner happens on the job rather than in a classroom, anyway. A qualified land use attorney is just as viable in this field as I am so long as they are inquisitive and willing to learn about community planning and design. I have to study up on legal requirements all the time for my job so it works both ways. I believe having a law degree offers you greater career flexibility in the long run than a Planning degree will....Simply put, a lawyer can serve as an excellent Planner but I could never get a job as an Attorney.

There are numerous jobs out there for smart people with law degrees, regardless of where that degree is from. A law degree is an indication to potential employers that you are trained to read and write well and to think about things critically - All good qualities. Unless you're on a fast track to work in a high paced, corporate law environment, I also think you'll be suprised how little it matters whether or not you attended Harvard. If you succeed in school and present yourself well, it shouldn't be much of a factor.