The three years of internship do not provide a comprehensive introduction into the profession. The main beneficiaries of the internship program are not the young architects but the firms who are guaranteed a steady supply of cheap labor. I have worked for a dozen firms, large and small, in different regions of the country. In no case did a firm acknowledge that it was receiving an economic subsidy and therefore had an educational responsibility to its interns. The firms get work at a rate which is held artificially low because interns are required to work for three years before being allowed to take the registration exam and become properly paid professionals in their own right. If the firms are not going to take a roll in education, then the internship becomes nothing but subsidized labor with the added benefit that potential competition is kept out of the market for three years. In our current system, the heads of firms only teach whatever they need you to know at the time, usually their preferred methods of construction or means of graphic representation. These things are useful, but they do not take three years to learn. One year is enough, and for the other two years, a wider range of professional activity should be counted toward accreditation. We are in an ironic situation where actual professional work does not count. If, as was my own experience, you design and build your own projects, your work does not count toward accreditation. It seems backwards that real experience in the comprehensive practice of architecture does not count while the uneven exposure in an office does. Real professional competence is not acknowledged while at the same time there is a misperception as to what actually occurs in an office and how much can really be learned there. In my experience the period of internship was the period of my slowest growth while the period of pursuing my own practice while not yet registered was the period of greatest professional growth. I would therefore propose the following reforms:

The firms are not going to properly educate interns, they are going to plead poverty and time pressure, and so the period of architectural internship under a registered architect needs to be reduced to one year. In this year the intern will learn from the firm what the firm has to offer.

An intern should be able to take the registration exam at any point. The exam is vital in ensuring that an architect can protect the public health and welfare. However, you do not learn to pass the exam by working for three years in an office. You pass it by studying for it.

Finally, the internship and accrediting system needs to accept a wider range of professional work, including real completed projects. In this way the process will become one which assesses professional competence and supports young talent rather than acting as a barrier to its formation.