Portfolio Coaching That Changed My Career
Working with Ertunc as a coach to build my portfolio has been a career-changing experience that went way beyond my initial expectations. Many may know Ertunc as a computational design expert. Through working with him closely, however, I have discovered that Ertunc is simply much more than that: he is an outstanding leader with an exceptional talent for teaching and motivating others to do their very best with a positive, self-reflective and healthy mindset. Ertunc's ability to tailor his advice to my very own situation and to give the right guidance based on context, without dogma, are rare gifts among specialists. I started the coaching with some very scattered, unpresentable work and a very vague, over-ambitious and therefore unproductive idea of how to deliver the portfolio as a whole. Coaching with Ertunc on a twice-a-week basis gave me a structured roadmap, from base camp to summit. Starting an adventure with a guide is completely different from having no guide and having to figure out everything on one's own. I will be forever grateful for his earnest and relentless push (always cordial, respectful and with a lot of warmth) for me to leave my comfort zone at exactly the right time. This is exactly what coaching is about: pushing you to confront uncomfortable realities and make adjustments accordingly, instead of giving you sugar-coated feedback. I will also be forever grateful for his willingness to accept a success-shared payment model. No one else in the architectural world does this, absolutely no one. This shows Ertunc's patient way of seeing coaching as an investment in a person's success and his genuine wish to make you succeed. As a result of working with Ertunc, I evolved from having no presentable portfolio and feeling very stuck with a non-traditional master's degree, to having a very strong portfolio that earned me interviews with leading firms in Berlin, Hamburg and Karlsruhe, and eventually landed a solid architect role covering LPH 1–5 in a German university town.