Julie was invited to a roundtable of local firm leaders organized by IIT College of Architecture.

In April 2026, twelve leaders from Chicago-based architecture and landscape architecture firms gathered for the inaugural meeting of the IIT Education Roundtable. The participants were owners and partners drawn in equal measure from small, medium, and large firms, of which only two were College of Architecture alumni. Kroloff said he cold-called some, and others he had met at various College of Architecture events. The professionals were joined by a group of faculty and board members from the college. 

“We want outside perspectives,” Kroloff says. It can be hard to get the head of a firm to come to a meeting like this; they’re busy. But several of them said they’d never heard anything like this before and liked the idea.” 

“I thought it was a good idea for him to open up the dialog between academia and people in practice,” says attendee Julie Michiels  (B. ARCH ’03), a partner at MAS Studio. “It’s good that it’s a two-way conversation; I think sometimes practices are out of touch with what’s going on in academia. Schools shouldn’t just be looking at what practices are doing, practices should be looking at what schools are doing.” 

“I know at [the College of Architecture] in particular there is a lot of overlap between teaching professors who are also in practice, and not all schools are like that,” Michiels adds. 

Thank you very much to Reed Kroloff for the invitation.