Deep roots, solid foundations

Through the MSU School of Architecture Advisory Council, alumni pay it forward to help today’s students become tomorrow’s mentors

By MSU Alumni Foundation

August 25^th, 2025

Barry Long ’87 came from Ithaca, New York, to study architecture at Montana State in the 1980s, attracted to both the quality of the program and Bozeman’s outdoor lifestyle.

Like most architecture students, Long spent most of his waking hours in Cheever Hall, home to the School of Architecture.

“Architecture education is studio-based, meaning spending afternoons, nights and weekends with classmates, focused on designing and modeling, in a uniquely collaborative environment,” Long said of his years studying architecture at MSU. “We built habitats together, ran our little coffee shop, and often slept under our desks. It was like creating our own community within Cheever Hall, and it reflects the demands of professional practice. Deep friendships were forged that will last a lifetime.”

Lynn McBride ’97 came to MSU from Casper and Riverton, Wyoming, where, as a child watching episodes of “This Old House” with her brother, she had known she wanted to be an architect. She said from her first day at MSU, when a classmate, and now a lifetime friend, helped her with a project, to her last day at MSU taking graduation pictures with her thesis adviser, “I felt supported, challenged, offered opportunities to grow and learn in ways that I had not imagined.” Now a partner at Mithun in Seattle and the current president of the MSU School of Architecture Advisory Council, McBride said the SOA faculty provided her with the foundation to “explore ideas in new ways we had not contemplated” and “pushed us to give more than we really thought we had for our projects.”

“That foundation that was given to us as students to go out and thrive in our professions is the motivation for me to give back to the school now,” McBride said. “The Advisory Council provides that opportunity.”

The common lifestyle, supportive faculty and resulting lifelong friendships are a few of the reasons why the School of Architecture boasts one of the most active alumni groups at Montana State. Now 61 members strong, the School of Architecture’s Advisory Council is a hands-on, dues-based organization.

The group includes members like Long, who is now the principal and president of Urban Design Associates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a leading international urban design firm specializing in master planning, design guidelines and architecture services. It also includes McBride and many other principals at top-ranked firms. Twice a year they leave the demands of busy firms and travel back to MSU to meet and mentor MSU students. Other months they meet on Zoom.

“It’s really unusual to have that many alumni actively engaged with current students and supporting the school,” said Michael Everts, director of the School of Architecture. He said the group not only provides mentoring but also supports student scholarships — having established two-thirds of all scholarship gifts through the MSU Alumni Foundation, totaling $106,000 — and funds an endowment that brings visiting scholars to campus. The group also helps students get jobs and internships and support the school’s needs. The group’s passion and commitment are a real asset for the school and are part of providing a quality education, Everts said.

The Advisory Council was formed after the school had gone through some rollercoaster years. In 1987, a state-wide grassroots campaign narrowly kept the school from being completely cut during a huge system-wide budget deficit. The support was well-earned. The MSU School of Architecture has long maintained a national reputation for excellence that continues to be bolstered by the fact that MSU students pass the national architectural registration exams at rates higher than nearly every program in the country, including those at Cornell, Harvard, Yale and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Kevin Chapin ’04, of Quattrocchi Kwok Architects in Santa Rosa, California, and a member of the MSU School of Architecture Advisory Council, confers with MSU architecture student Lexi Sparrow about a project.

Then, in 1997 the Montana Board of Regents approved a plan that made MSU only the second accredited school in the country to grant a five-year master’s degree in architecture. Clark Llewellyn, then the director, formed the Advisory Council in 1998 to garner support from some of the school’s successful alumni. The first meeting included six alumni: Wayne Berg ’69, Warren Dean ’69, Bill Hoy ’81, Larry Hurlbert ’76, Jerrily Kress ’71 and Keith Rupert ’66. Dean, now of Houston and a retired vice president at Jacobs, the number one project management firm in the world, still attends the meetings faithfully.

“Even though I’m now retired, I still find returning to SOA enriching,” said Dean. “To see what students are doing, have dialogue with the director and staff, and catch up with what the AC practicing architects are doing in their practices as well as the challenges they face. Being involved continues to be a rewarding experience.”

In the early years, the advisory council established the Endowment for Excellence, creating a sustainable future for the school. In addition, alumni on the council have been leaders in fundraising for the Visiting Professorship Endowment that was initiated when approval was given by the Montana University System Board of Regents for MSU to retroactively award Master of Architecture degrees to graduates who received a Bachelor of Architecture degree prior to 1997. The Visiting Professor Endowment, which is nearly $1 million, allows the school to invite a visiting scholar to teach in the school every year.

McBride, who was a recent graduate during those formative years, said that Llewellyn’s vision was extraordinary.

“(Llewellyn) was a firecracker who had a tremendous amount of energy and knew how to get people involved and engaged in meaningful ways,” she said. The Advisory Council has grown steadily, recently in both age and gender diversity, she said. A tiered dues system supports this, with younger professionals starting their careers paying less than established professionals.

One of the younger members of the advisory council is Nicole Andersson, a 2021 master’s in architecture graduate whose design in her graduate year at MSU won an award from the American Institute’s COTE Top Ten for Students designs in the country. Now with Henneberry Eddy Architects in Bozeman, Andersson said she joined the Advisory Council last fall to reconnect with the school and give back.

“The Advisory Council is a good way to become involved with the school and become involved with students and help support them,” Andersson said. Andersson is a mentor to two architecture students and finds working with them especially satisfying.

“There is a culture of leadership in the council,” Andersson said. “That leadership translates over to the meetings, where we are surrounded by principals in their firms, which is kind of fantastic. The people who are involved really care about MSU and the school. It’s their alma mater and they want to see the SOA do well.”

Andersson said the firms represented by members of the council focus on hiring MSU students. “We want to give back; we want to enhance the field of architecture and the quality of MSU students.”

The Advisory Council’s mentoring program, which had been informal until 2022, when it was formalized with the establishment of an official mentoring program led by faculty member Zuzanna Karczewska. Students can become a mentee as soon as they are officially admitted to the professional program after their second year. About 60 percent of undergraduates, or 115 students, and 65 professionals are involved in the voluntary program, with mentors coming from 12 states across the country.

“Our students who are in the mentorship program really appreciate having a relationship with a professional who is outside of the school, directly involved in the profession, and who has a different outlook on things than the architecture faculty,” Karczewska said. “It is refreshing.”

MSU School of Architecture Advisory Council members Lauri Moffet-Fehlberg and Barry Long shared their experience with current architecture students last spring when the advisory council met in Bozeman.

Lauri Moffet-Fehlberg, who graduated from Montana State School of Architecture in 1983, said the mentorship program builds important personal and professional bonds early on.

“The architectural community is fairly small, and the mentor program builds important connections and is a springboard that will, for many, open doors for internships and jobs,” said Moffet-Fehlberg, who is senior vice president of architecture for the Dahlin Group in Pleasanton, California. She met her husband Kurt Fehlberg ’83, director of architecture for Dahlin, at MSU. Both are active in the Advisory Council and both are mentors who see the importance of the connections between mentors and mentees. “The (program) builds lasting relationships,” she said.

Octavia Fisher ’25, a student from Bozeman who is going into her first year of her master’s program, said that having a mentor from the Advisory Council has been inspiring. Her mentor would share his projects with his mentees and discuss his presentations to clients.

“Being able to see how that communication process works was one of the most helpful things for me,” Fisher said. “He also would critique our studio projects. It is inspiring to have an outside prospect directly from the industry give you feedback.”

But perhaps the largest challenge to the council in many decades now looms. Two years ago, MSU’s master of architecture professional degree program received an eight-year term of continuing accreditation from the National Architectural Accrediting Board, the highest level of accreditation available through NAAB, the National Architectural Accrediting Board. The accreditation was enthusiastic with one exception. It warned that MSU would have to grow its footprint to accommodate the number of students in the school or risk failing accreditation in the future. Everts said because architects cannot be hired without graduating from an accredited school, a future lack of accreditation could doom the program.

Everts said officials from the School of Architecture and the College of Arts and Architecture have already begun the first steps in a long and difficult journey to expand Cheever Hall. The effort would require substantial private donations. The Advisory Council is already deeply involved in finding solutions to meet the challenge to increase the space needed, McBride said.

After all, the 61 members of the group are professionals who work every day to find elegant solutions to solving problems, large and small.

“We care,” McBride said. “This is a special place. We have deep, collective roots that we hope only to grow deeper with future generations of architecture students.”