Matthew was always easy to shop for as a kid. “Legos. They were always, if not the only things on my list, then they took up the majority,” he says, and his creations steadily evolved in complexity as he got older. By the time he was applying to college, he applied to every architecture program up and down the east coast. His love for architecture further evolved at Virginia Tech, where he studied in Switzerland for a semester and traveled Europe as a form of “immersive studio.”

Serendipity struck in his fourth year at Tech, when his professor took Matthew and two other students to New York to do a design charrette with Perkins Eastman Co-CEO and Executive Director Nick Leahy. He later started work for Perkins Eastman following his graduation in 2012. He initially worked with the Healthcare practice team, where he gained experience working on the award-winning NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital Center for Community Health. “It was invaluable experience” working on a such a large-scale project through every state of design and construction. “It was a great opportunity to grow really quickly in my career, and to work under so many experienced people who imparted their knowledge.”

More recently, Young has moved into the firm’s corporate interiors area to grow as a project manager, where he has already led a large interiors job for the headquarters of an international bank in New York.

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Having benefitted from having mentors in the firm as he moved up in his career at Perkins Eastman, Matthew now serves as a mentor to younger designers who are interested in project management.