Dear Julie,

I’m looking forward to talking today–I was just checking to see whether we had agreed on a time. I thought it might be helpful to write to you ahead of time though. I’m free to talk most of today–would sometime between 11am and 1pm work for you?

As I shared on Friday, I am excited and humbled by the opportunity and feel confident it will be a good fit for my skills and interests. There are two sets of needs that I need to resolve before I can say yes. I’ll describe them both below, as well as my sense of how we can address them.

First is the question of whether Buffalo will be a good fit for my partner. We spent much of the weekend talking about it and learning more about the region–both what is exciting and what is potentially challenging. She is graduating from UPenn’s School of Design with a terminal Master’s in Landscape Architect and hopes to have a career spanning practice, research, and teaching. The reality is that the most prominent firms doing the kind of work she wants to do are in the coastal cities–Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles. No surprises on that list. There are a few firms in Buffalo and additional possibilities in Toronto. On the academic side, Buffalo, and particularly Toronto, do have strong university departments of landscape architecture/urban planning. She is also concerned about feeling isolated from the communities of design practice which center particularly in New York City and Philadelphia.

This first question is more something we need to figure out than something UB can accommodate. Our plan is to take a road trip up to Buffalo during the first week of January to get a sense of the

Zuz (my partner) is also making inquiries into

She served on the search committee at Penn which hired Sean Burkholder (https://www.design.upenn.edu/landscape-architecture/people/sean-burkholder), who was previously an assistant professor at UB.

Thanks, Chris