In December of 2016, AIA's Board of Directors updated the Institute's position statements to clarify the term "intern." The newly approved statement specified that, while "intern" remains a supported title for students working in an architectural office while pursuing an architecture degree, it should not apply to those who have already earned a NAAB-accredited degree and are currently working for a firm while pursuing licensure. For those individuals, AIA strongly supports two titles: "architectural associate" and "design professional."
The statement is AIA's response to a lengthy debate on using "intern" to describe graduates on the path to licensure, an issue of importance to many emerging professionals. And while the two terms come with their own complications on a state-by-state basis, there's a consensus across the profession that this statement is a much-needed step in the right direction.
"My first exposure to the intern titling question came when I joined the AIA Intern Titling Work Group," says Danielle Mitchell, Assoc. AIA, design professional at Fung Associates and past president of the American Institute of Architecture Students. "The group included students, principals, people who've been working on licensure for a long time, and people who didn't intend on getting licensed at all. It was a diverse group of people, and led to a lot of good back-and-forth."
This work group—which included Mitchell as well as Gordon E. Landreth, FAIA, and Venesa Alicea, AIA—met to narrow down proposals to AIA's board on which titles the Institute should support in place of "intern." They began with a long list of potential titles gleaned from over 3,000 survey responses, and eventually winnowed the list to ten viable options that underwent considerable evaluation before ultimately coming to consensus in support of “architectural associate” and “design professional.”
"A big element of our discussion was thinking about what the Institute's role would be," she says, "and how it would be a loss if AIA was passive with the new titles. AIA is called upon to be a bold leader, and to shy away from 'architectural associate' would be keeping AIA out of the conversation."
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