The process of becoming an Architect with a capital A has been reduced to an examination process and a checklist; internship itself has been narrowly defined by NCARB to include and be limited to the Internship Development Program. And as checklists tend to go, there are quotas and time requirements and activities to be performed, check, check, check. And members of our profession have yet to pull back against the moldering reins of an outdated and ineffectual procedure to demand change in the process that is responsible for driving so many Interns away from professional licensure.

What should Architectural Internship be?

Architectural Internship should be as much about creating human experiences, meeting human needs with beauty and humility and learning to be true to one's self as an artist as it is about public health, safety and welfare.

Why do we define Architect only as someone who completes a checklist of soulless standards and passes a series of standardized tests, and not as someone who shapes the built environment, who creates poetry in four dimensions and opportunities for life and form to intermingle with grace and discernment?

The fact is we do define it this way. The profession is very much aware in a gut wrenching, rapid-heart-beating, and adrenalin pumping kind of way that this is what the real architecture is all about. So call us architects with a little 'a'. Architectural registration is declining, not because graduates, interns and professionals are all uninterested in being Architects, but because they are passionately, madly, lustfully in thrall with being architects.

Architectural Internship should be a balance of the ephemeral and the significant, the universal and the minutia. Internship should cultivate passion as well as dedication, should be flexible with the morphosis of the profession and should be the reaper of the best talent we have.

The career of an architect varies greatly from one individual to another; we decry facsimile in the built environment, why is it acceptable in our internship? Internship should be a partnership between the Intern and a Mentor, relying on the integrity of the professional to ensure that the fundamentals of health safety and welfare are imparted. Internship should consist of one or more essential relationships that are forged; indeed it is the desire for such that leads to countless instigations of mentorship programs in countless professional organizations. Let us shuck the brutal repetition of a mundane task list and return to our craft.

What is my own Internship Experience?

I served time at three separate design firms before learning that I would have more and greater effect on my community by taking on a position of advocacy within a non-profit organization than by practicing Architecture with a capital A. I feel more like an architect now than I ever have. This organization, incidentally, has been led by a licensed architect for the last 15 years.