A typical month for me involves many things atypical of a recent graduate of architecture school (M.Arch. 2002). I have conversations with college students aspiring to either become designers or gain a better understanding of how the world comes to look the way it does. I give lectures on how a designer sees the work of architects usually encountered in architectural history courses. I attend lectures by accomplished architects, planners, landscape architects, urban historians, and material culture scholars. I read Preservation magazine, discuss the history and theories of preservation in a seminar. I prepare reports on modern buildings in anticipation of a national register nomination for campus heritage. I read extensively on how cultures shape the built environment, how social groups inform space and place. I teach college students how to draw the built environment around them analytically, using drawing as a thinking technology. I attend public town meetings and craft op-ed pieces. I go to architectural exhibits in other cities and write articles for the local newspaper. I cook up ideas for big art, public art that celebrate the built environment around us.

Everything I undertake these days is tied to a larger purpose about communicating and making more present the architecture in our everyday lives. I am committed to crediting not just designers, but planners, landscape architects, construction workers and other crafts people, and the general public with the physical character of our environments. I want people to see, to engage, to participate in architecture.

Yet, my aspirations are purely personal - in scope, in ambition, in endeavoring. Despite my architectural training and the incredible abilities I gained to see and communicate the many intricacies composing the places we live within/around/in response to, I was essentially abandoned by my profession the second I stepped off the traditional path to practice.

Am I an intern? Not according to how AIA and NCARB would define my employment. Am I practicing? Hardly. The only place I seem to find some fellowship is within academics.

Yet, I am contributing to the profession. I am an advocate for quality design, an architecturally engaged public, a richer design process. But I am not a member of the internship club.

My design education taught me how to design my life. I have chosen what the profession has insipidly named an "alternative career." This catch all term is purely the result of a need by the profession to have a rather provincial and tidy definition of "intern." I am, thus, the opposite of "intern." Is such an uncluttered and sadly thin definition for the youth of our profession really what's best? Is losing characters like me a path the profession wishes to continue to take? What stagnancy will result? What richness have we lost already in defining the youth of this profession with such narrowness and exclusionary vision?

Internship should be something that supports a broad interpretation of what it means to participate in this profession.