Today, there is less and less a single straight path from a student's earliest moments of curiosity regarding the design profession to his or her emergence as a competent and mature architect. Currently the profession as a whole is charged with addressing an increasingly complex set of issues ranging from sustainability to the role of technology in design. In the same way that no one school of architecture could expect its students to master the full spectrum of these issues, no architectural practice could hope to produce buildings that respond with equal depth to all the problems for which "architectural design" as a whole seeks to establish solutions.

As the range of issues falling within the purview of the design professional continues to widen so the spectrum of academic and professional backgrounds that constitute "acceptable" foundations for a career in architecture broadens. The expansion of architecture's boundaries to include new areas of research is and has always been a source of enrichment for the profession. This type of growth, however, poses the constant problem of overwhelming and hence weakening the intellectual threads that hold our diverse community of professionals together. I believe the primary role of the architectural internship program should be to strengthen these threads.

The notion of standardization is key to the effectiveness of internship towards this end. The standardized set of requirements that constitute the internship program should aim to give all young professionals seeking licensure -regardless of training or aspirations-a common basis from which to begin exploring the further dimensions of the profession. The authors of these requirements should ground their work in a program of research aimed at locating those areas of knowledge and ability most necessary for the successful conception, development and realization of built works in the contemporary world. As changes occur in the social, economic and technological realities that determine the ways in which buildings are produced, so should the makeup of the internship program be under constant revision.

A well-developed internship program would have an affirmative impact on the identity of our profession as a whole. It would unite professionals with widely diverging interests through a common understanding of the conditions governing the creation of buildings in today's world.