A Day With Moody Nolan's Maya Madison

Maya Madison is a designer at Moody Nolan in their New York City office. Maya’s day involves a jazzy wake up, Soulselection Radio, detailing the exterior curtain wall of Delta’s newest concourse at LaGuardia Airport, and studying for her AREs.

6:45am: Every morning I’m awakened by my phone, which I have set to a jazz playlist from Spotify as a wake-up call. Shamelessly I am notorious for pressing the snooze button for at least twenty minutes until I can muster up the energy to get out of bed.

7:15am: I’m finally up and preparing for a morning walk or jog through my Brooklyn neighborhood of Bed-Stuy - one of the good habits I’ve picked up during the pandemic. This has been the only way for me to forcefully leave my apartment for some fresh air which always helps me to fully wake up. On this particular day, I have decided to walk which has been more enjoyable for me during the winter months. I love walking in the morning because, with the few people outside, for a moment, the city feels like it belongs to me. During my walk, I’m always listening to a Soulselection Radio set in my earbuds with no set destination.

8:30am: By this time I have showered and dressed for the workday which is usually an ensemble of an oversized hoodie, a pair of leggings, and some fuzzy slippers. I sign on to my computer and as my Revit model takes its time to load, I make my cup of coffee for the morning. My breakfast includes a boiled egg, a banana, and reading emails.

The task for the day consists of detailing the exterior curtain wall of Delta’s newest concourse at LaGuardia Airport in Queens. Moody Nolan has teamed with Gensler to deliver design services for this newly renovated airport. As a designer in Moody Nolan’s newest office in New York City, I am able to be a part of the small New York studio while still gaining experience on “big firm” projects.

I love drawing construction details. I love how something so technical and intricate can be abstracted through the representation of lines and patterns on a sheet - or, in my case, a screen. I usually throw on a podcast to help me focus as I finish my drawings.

10:30am: With my firm’s Director of New York Operations also being an adjunct professor for a Second Year Interior Design Studio at Pratt Institute, I am able to sit in as a visiting critic on her students’ project presentations. For a couple of hours I am taken to a space where fire protection, code regulations, and structural bearing capacities aren’t as much of a priority and the limits of design feel nonexistent. I relish listening to her students explain their design concepts to me. After each of their presentations, I am able to give constructive criticism to help mold their designs and push them to delve deeper into their concept which will hopefully lead to a more refined outcome.

12:30pm: This is the time of day where I step away from my computer to prepare a turkey sandwich where the bread is always toasted with mustard instead of mayonnaise. With my turkey sandwich, I’ll have my homemade green juice, a recipe I’ve perfected with the right amount of lemon juice and ginger spice. I’ll take a few minutes to scroll my social media (Instagram and LinkedIn; two opposing virtual worlds) and text my friends.

2:30pm: The afternoon is usually when I'll have back to back coordination meetings via Microsoft Teams. This particular meeting is with our curtain wall consultant. After he modifies my mullion profiles and edits the path of my weather barrier line, I have more clarity on how this whole system encloses our building while still providing endless views out to Flushing Bay and the East River.

5:00pm: As the evening time rolls around, I start to wrap up my work for the day and communicate with my team members tasks that have been completed and items still outstanding. Before the end of each day, I’ll usually make a list on a post-it note of things to do for the following day and the rest of the week.

6:15pm: By this time I have forced myself to sign off from work and transition into studying for my ARE’s, my most love-hate part of the day. Love is the fact that I know it will pay off and I almost always end the day learning something new. Hate is the amount of time it takes out of my day and the seemingly endless amount of information that I feel I need to consume. In these few hours of studying I’ll spend one hour reading from The Fundamentals of Building Construction and another hour or so doing practice problems while squeezing in a quick dinner of rice, seasoned air-fried chicken, and brussels sprouts warmed up from the day before.

9:00pm: This is my wind-down part of the evening. I return to another Soulselection Radio set, this time being played on my Bose speakers and select all seven of my yellow, red, and brown colored marks from my set of 80. As I sip on a glass of Reisling, I begin to draw in my small 8 and a half by 5 and a half inch sketchbook. I draw something quick, no more than 40 minutes from start to finish because the more detail I add to these small drawings the more I start to hate them. I know that within this window of one to thirty minutes I can create something close to a refined sketch, which never reaches perfection from my perspective, but is good enough.

10:00pm: Now that it’s towards the very end of my day, I head to my bedroom to talk to a loved one on the phone, either my mom who still lives in my hometown suburb of Shaker Heights right outside Cleveland, Ohio, or my boyfriend who lives a few Brooklyn neighborhoods away from me. The topics of discussion with my boyfriend are the day’s current events (which recently have been exhaustive), funny stories from work, or an in-depth analysis of the shows that we’re both currently watching.

11:30pm: After talking on the phone, I’ll turn off all the lights and watch an episode of “Girlfriends” on Netflix which automatically puts my body in “it’s time to sleep” mode. While the show relaxes me, It is still impossible for me to fall asleep with the TV on so after a maximum of two episodes I turn off the TV and eventually fall asleep.