The assignment was challenging, but it was more than just a class assignment — it was a real project with a real client. URI landscape architecture students were asked last fall to design a two-and-a-half acre municipal park and parking lot at a particular site in the town of Westerly. They had to incorporate local materials and green infrastructure while also meeting federal guidelines for areas at high-risk for flooding. And after coming up with their designs, the students had to present their recommendations to a room full of town officials.

That’s the kind of real-world experience you can expect at URI if your passion is landscape architecture. Every year, students work on public service projects in a local community, and every year the students say that while the design project was demanding, they especially appreciated the chance to work in a realistic setting with all the pressures and deadlines of the real world.

“It’s so beneficial to our learning and development process to work with real life clients and present our final projects and receive critical feedback,” said junior Emily Sanchez, whose park design included a three-level artificial tree house. “It definitely gets students out of their comfort zones and seriously prepares us for what’s ahead.”

Students in another landscape architecture studio last fall made recommendations about storm resilience strategies and sustainable designs for the working waterfront in Providence Harbor. Based on their analysis of the site and forecasts for rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms, they proposed constructing a 2,000-foot long, 25-foot tall barrier designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane and hold back a 21-foot storm surge that would otherwise inundate critical port infrastructure.

“That was a tough site to work on because there’s not a lot you can change about the operations there,” said senior Emily Patrolia. “It’s a big confusing site with a lot of private property and government agencies involved. There are a lot of different entities to be sensitive to, but it also gave us a good sense of what we’ll be doing when we go to work in the professional world.”

In past years, the students created design plans for a recreation center in Richmond, a school in South Kingstown, a campground at Fishermen’s Memorial State Park, and a high-traffic commercial intersection in Wakefield. They even created a memorial to the September 11 attacks for the Natick, Mass., fire and police departments, which included a twisted steel beam salvaged from the World Trade Center.

While the students are always excited to share their design ideas with the public, the projects are also a powerful learning experience.

“This is the first project I’ve ever worked on where I had a real client who I worked for,” said student John Luca about the Richmond recreation center project. “We learned a lot from having to respond to their needs. It’s not what we wanted that was important in this project, it was what the people of Richmond wanted that was important.”

It’s a lesson that you, too, will learn when you’re ready to put your design ideas to a real test.