At nine years old, Amanda Lang [BES/91] was sure she’d be an architect. She spent hours drawing overhead layouts of buildings, filling the spaces with imagined people and weaving stories about who they were.

It wasn’t until Lang was a student in the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture that she realized architecture wasn’t actually her calling. “I was mediocre,” Lang says.

As it turned out, the stories she most cared about had less to do with the structures she sketched, and more to do with the lives unfolding within them.