Do you want to be an architect? Or just feel like one?

For six weeks every summer at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), more than 250 students get the chance to see what the world of architecture is like from the inside.

Through the GSD's Career Discovery program, students get the chance to work with graduate students on studio projects in all areas of design. And every week, their work is reviewed by professional architects.

"When they finish with this program they really have an understanding of what it is to be an architect," says Hope Cohn, the GSD's staff coordinator for Career Discovery.

The Career Discovery program was started in 1972 by John A. Seiler '51. Seiler says he taught at the Business School for 17 years before coming to a disturbing realization: he hated it.

What he really wanted to do, Seiler says, is to be an architect. And thus was born the Career Discovery program.

For some, the six-week program is a chance to see whether they are interested in architecture. Others see it as a transition to graduate school. And others use the program as an opportunity to build a portfolio and further their careers.

When students enroll in the program they commit themselves to at least 10 hours of work each day. And most students say they spend much more time working on the five problems they are given over the course of the summer.

In addition, students attend a series of lectures and seminars designed to teach them about architecture and design. Lecture topics range from "Graphic and Modelmaking" to "Use of Computers in Design" to "Preparing a Portfolio."

But students say that while these lectures are interesting, their most important time is spent in the studio, working on design projects.

Each of the three concentrations--architecture, landscape and urban design--has different projects for most of the summer, but all of the students participate in the first problem: to build a wall.

"On the wall project, you would be amazed, there were 120 different walls--no two were identical," says Shoaib N. Ahmad, a student in the architecture program, which is the largest of Career Discovery's three sections, attracting 80 percent of the students and nearly 75 percent of the instructors.

Ahmad's other projects for the summer included making a collage based on the film Do the Right Thing, designing a beach house, analyzing a building, making rough sketches and redesigning a bookstore which, in the program's scenario, had burned down.

The actual bookstore--untouched by fire--stands in Boston, and students say they spent much of their time at the site, measuring and taking photographs so that their designs would be realistic.

"We try to give them projects that are in the Boston area so that they can see the site, measure it and get a good feeling for it," Cohn says.