Shanelle recognized that completing her final project using software she was unfamiliar with was a risky move, and the honest truth is that she nearly didn’t finish on time. Now, mind you, I knew nothing about Archicad yet.” She said, “I decided to stop using Revit and do my final project on Archicad. Shanelle dove into Archicad head-first and a swam like a champ. It’s a whole lot easier than Revit, it’s a whole lot easier than Google SketchUp, it’s a whole lot easier than Rhino.

What am I looking at? What is this?’ And she said, ‘No. “When I first saw it, I was a bit overwhelmed. “Rafaella was showing me around her MacBook one day when I spotted a surprising application and I immediately asked her, ‘What program is that? Man, that does not look like Revit,’” Shanelle inquired. This was unusual because FAMU’s curriculum at the time only taught Revit as its primary building information modeling (BIM) application. “I noticed pretty quickly that she was using a MacBook Pro,” Shanelle said. When Shanelle was a freshman at FAMU studying architecture, there was another young lady in her class, Rafaella, that transferred in from the University of Florida. Starting to feel that powerhouse vibe I mentioned a few paragraphs back? But wait, there’s more! Archicad Comes onto the Scene In fact, she executed her duties so well as APX Secretary as a freshman, that she was voted in as APX President in her sophomore year - and she remained president until she graduated from FAMU as a senior. “I’m always putting out ideas, I always jump on things, and I knew that being on the Executive Board, where you can actually make change happen, that’s where I wanted to be.”

“So I really jumped in and I did that because I know the kind of personality I have,” Shanelle said. In fact, in her second semester at Florida A&M University (FAMU), she found a position for herself on the Executive Board of Alpha Rho Chi (APX), a national professional fraternity for architecture and the allied arts.

Archicad for students