Every morning while driving along the 355 at Metro D.C region, one single question always comes up into my mind in the rush hour traffic. What is the difference between yesterday and today?

Joy is a key word in our work. If we don't feel joy in what you are doing, then you are not really operating- (and) there are miserable moments that you have to live through, but in the end joy will prevail. I believe most of us choose this professional because of its, creativity and the power that we can make a better community and better world by making a better place.

It is the emerging architects who have the ability to instill passion into the profession and to adjust the mainstream with their diversity. Speaking of the diversity, the increasingly diversified face of the profession is largely concentrated in the younger-generation of architects. We have to find our ways to represent different gender, race, religions, class and culture, and to provide a platform for potential co-existence of differences and diversities. How can we represent the diversity?

To change world is to change us first.

Intern is the most diverse segment of the profession. For example, I am female, I am Chinese. Unfortunately, the females, the people with different colors' voices have been under-represented. Meanwhile, more and more experienced or licensed architects immigrated to the U.S. According to the 2003 internship and career survey, only 11% are female and 6% of them are the people of color, while we have 50% female students graduating from school every year!

NARB and the Intern Development Program (IDP) are sometime they become the barrier for female intern, minority intern and intern with overseas education background. For instance, to take the ARE test, it requires the candidate to have U.S professional degree and certain amount of IDP units accumulated in U.S. under the supervision of the licensed architect. The entire requirement sounds reasonable, however, the complexity and difficulty of foreign professional degree evaluation process make the people who only hold the foreign degrees unlikely to spend huge amount of time and money to go through this frustrating process. As a last choice but a must, they will end up with alternative career paths.

The barrier in our current systems prevents us from boosting the diversity within our professional diversity, isolating us from the diversified world and also suffocating our creativity by trying to make a uniform path for everyone who wants to become a licensed architect. We have to both ask and participate finding the answer to the questions: who are we and what we are doing?

The emerging architects hold the power to shape the society with their ideas, values and actions. To provide the equal opportunity to the female and the minority architect intern, to support ourselves by facing and embrace the diversity within us become the prerequisite condition for us, as a group, Let us stay together to voice ourselves loudly.