When Frank Lloyd Wright began his career under Louis Sullivan, architectural internship was a simple apprenticeship: a recent graduate arrived at the office of a master, ready to learn drawing techniques, construction, client interaction, and business practices. Architects were generally educated and their practices were broad: houses, civic buildings, commercial centers, urban plans, park designs, churches, and transportation infrastructure were all the purview of an architect. An intern could learn everything he needed in the glow off a master’s drafting board.

As the amount of technical information that architectural practice required grew, new professions like landscape architecture, city planning, and structural engineering arose. Even within architecture, specialties emerged: housing, healthcare, education, and theater projects are typically the domain of firms or teams who practice exclusively in that area. These changes to the profession, paired with economic incentive for firms to pigeonhole an intern, make it exceedingly difficult for today’s interns to gain exposure to the entire practice, even while they are completing NCARB’s IDP, which is intended to provide a diversity of experiences.

The value of a diverse internship experience is not the mastery of every specialty, but an understanding of the perspective of each expertise in the design and construction process. In order to more broadly expose future architects to the wide range of information, people, types of projects, and methods that they will need to successfully integrate in their professional practice, a system of short-term externship positions should be included as one alternative way of obtaining IDP or other state licensure requirements. Interns would still be able to meet their work experience requirement through a “traditional” internship experience, but the externship track could be an option alongside a more centralized internship experience.

Interns would receive credit for 1 to 4 week-long (full time or equivalent) placements in one of several situations:

• answering public questions at a zoning permit counter desk,
• preparing bid estimates or schedules of values for a contractor,
• writing feasibility studies in a real estate developer’s office,
• inspecting disaster-affected housing with state or federal agents, or
• researching case law for an attorney who represents architects in practice disputes.

The 2003 Internship and Career Survey showed that over half of all IDP interns reported that they would have to switch firms to complete IDP. An externship system recognizes this reality, creating a structure for interns to be exposed to a range of experiences without forcing them to leave a job. Employers could use slow periods in the form’s workload to schedule interns to work part-time and complete an externship, returning to regular schedules as the pace of projects in the office picked up.

The experiences gained in externships would be genuine, and would provide the intern with several different perspectives of the industry. Rather than learn from an architect what a permit inspector looks for in approving a design, the intern will learn first-hand, and will be better equipped when she finds herself applying for a permit in her own practice.