Profile

Madeline Knoll
An Admirable Aspiring Arcitect

Madeline Knoll, a second year at NDSU, is one of many who are pursuing the
challenging path to becoming an architect. Architecture is an ambitious path for any
student, and anyone pursuing it must truly love it to persevere through the mentally and
financially draining degree. According to Madeline, she has encountered projects that
have required a minimum of 18 hours worth of work in just a single week to finish. She
relayed this to me with a slight grin on her face, showing me that, contrary to
expectation, she actually quite enjoys that situation. As another who is at the very start
of this path, I was extremely excited for the opportunity to meet and hear from Madeline
and to catch a glimpse of the love she has for her major and future profession. After
having a chance to talk to her, I can only hope to reach a level of adoration for the
architecture profession as she showed me that day. It is my immense pleasure to convey
to you what an amazing and inspiring person Madeline Knoll is.
Madeline is originally from Mendota Heights, in the general Twin Cities area of
Minnesota. She attended Sibley highschool there before coming to NDSU. There she
lived with her family: her mom, dad, and a younger brother, and her beloved silky
terrier. With her family, she has traveled to many national and state parks, where she
has developed a love of photography, especially of wildlife and of stillife in nature. While
in highschool, Madeline was an avid hockey player, to a point where the leader of the
NDSU hockey club has asked her to join them a few times, but which she has rejected
each time. I found that she is a part of many school organizations such as the CircleK
club and the school finance commission, and I found that she is someone who enjoys
spending time alone in her apartment watching netflix in her free time. These are all
things that I learned from Madeline during our interview, but coming into the interview
I had no idea what to expect. I had interacted with Madeline solely over text, but I had
never met her nor talked to her about herself, so this interview was a very welcome
opportunity for me.
I got to know Madeline through her mother, who was a coworker of mine at an
internship I worked the summers of 2019 and 2021. When I went back to work for
Ever-Green Energy this past summer, it was common knowledge that I was going to
NDSU in the fall to study architecture. Lisa Knoll, Madeline’s mom, approached me with
an offer to introduce me to her daughter who happened to be a second year at the same
school and in the same major that I was entering. This was how I met Madeline. Since
then, I have gone to Madeline with many questions and concerns about the architecture
major and about school in general, but had never had the chance to formally meet her in
person.
When it finally came time to meet Madeline for the first time I found her to be a
young woman of about my height, around 5’5, with frizzy, light brown hair, and excited
brown eyes. She turned up that day enthusiastic to talk to me about everything she was
passionate about, to share that passion with even one other person. The majority of our
interview consisted of talking about architecture and her love for her major. It was to the
degree that she arrived at the interview covered in dirt from site mapping for a project of
hers. Even despite all the side conversations we had and all the little fun facts that I
learned about her, her love and adoration of architecture, everything about it, are what
truly stood out to me the most out of everything we talked about.
There was one point in the interview where we deviated from the topic of
architecture for a second, and I used this opportunity to ask her a rather light question:
who would she have a meal with if she could have a meal with any two people, dead or
alive. Even before trying to think of someone funny, or even just someone she generally
admired, Madeline says that she would probably choose “some architecture people” and
goes on to name Frank Loid Wright and Van Der Rough. It is only after she stops and
ponders names for a solid minute that she finally gives me characters from Grey’s
Anatomy. This was just one of a few examples where Madeline would really show me her
love of architecture in very simple ways. Another great example was when we were
talking about what it is that she loves most about architecture. In the middle of
answering that question, she tosses out something that really puts her love for
architecture on display. She randomly says to me, “you love every single project, you
spend 15 hours on one project, you know?”(Madeline Knoll). What amazed me most
about this comment she made in passing was not the comment itself, but how she had
said this. She had said this so enthusiastically and so excitedly. It felt like she was
genuinely conveying to me that she really did love engaging in projects that she would
have to devote many hours of every day into just to be able to finish it on time and in a
way that left her satisfied with her work.
Despite these more out-of-the-way comments, Madeline’s love for architecture
stood out the most when we were talking about just that, architecture. When asked
what it was she loves most about it, she had a couple of things to say. She says that, first
of all, one of the best things about this major is “the professors in general.” She admires
the work they do as both full-time architects on top of teaching classes and she admires
their pure love for what they do. In order to get her point across on how much her
professors love what they teach, she admiringly told me that her professor had “talked
about a line for 25 minutes” that day(Madeline Knoll). You could tell while listening to
her that she genuinely connected to her professors as fellow lovers of architecture, and
she enjoyed them as both architects and people. It is her professors’ love of architecture
which gives her “so much energy that [she can] sit through a 3-and-a-half-hour class”
happily(Madeline Knoll). She had such a deep and admirable respect for her teachers,
and this positive attitude of hers towards her classes really just left me in awe through
the entire interview.
A little later in the interview, we got to talking about what Madeline aspired to do
with her architecture degree. She told me she wantes to work on residential housing, but
the reason she gave me for her choice was a little surprising to me. Madeline told me she
thinks that “creating a home and a space with really deep meaning is super important”
when designing houses. This was something that I hadn’t thought of before about
design, but it definitely left an impact on me. She went on to describe how she had done
projects where she was told to connect her project to a metaphor. She elaborated on how
this was something she felt she already did with her work, and that she was really
excited to be able to carry that sentiment into a class project on purpose. This was
something quite profound to me. It is not often that you find college sophomores with
those sorts of feelings about their majors or career aspirations. When talking about
architecture and what she loves about it, Madeline gives off an air much more mature
than that of a typical college student, and that was very inspiring. This all only served to
strengthen my sentiment that she really loves what she does.
By the end of the interview, I had found Madeline to be a very interesting and
admirable person, as an upperclassman, as a fellow architecture student, and as a fellow
human being and struggling college student. Time and time again I found that some of
the most inspirational aspects of Madeline Knoll really stemmed from her love of and
devotion to architecture, and everything that comes with it, as well as her overall and
overwhelming positivity to the challenges that an architecture student faces.
 Works Cited
Knoll, Madeline. Personal Interview. September 1, 2021.