Yes they can IF they are getting compensation in the form of academic credit in a structured program via their NAAB-accredited school.
It's a pretty simple criteria: you get paid in money, or you get paid in academic credit. Otherwise, you don't work for a scumbag that would tell you differently.
NCARB is pretty clear on the matter. I'm pretty sure you can't claim unpaid internships for idp credit. I believe they say you must be 'employed' to earn training units. Perhaps just getting some experience trumps that for some interns. It's a sleazy practice anyway you cut it. The interesting part for me is that it's not the small boutique firms that do this, but the high power firms with plenty of revenue.
to be honest, i think the flsa requirements for student internships are fairly inane. why on earth would a firm take on an intern that was not doing productive work? professional offices are not classrooms or babysitting services. it seems like the value of having a student intern, for both the intern and the office, is to have him or her doing productive work. i'm opposed to unpaid labor, but an unpaid student internship is a completely different beast, and in my opinion, the law simply doesn't understand the difference.
We get an intern from the UC system once a year. they have to come here twice a week. we dont pay them. they pay UC for their education. they must intern at a professional architecture firm for a 3 credit class in school. The school asks alumni who have firms in the area to do it for them...and we do. Trust me, most of them dont have a clue of what they are doing - we usually get them to pick up redlines on a door schedule or a sheet index....something thats hard to screw up and easy for us to check.
I had a firm offer me an unpaid internship (but not one where the experience and who it was would have made up for it). I think the practice is bad, and should be illegal. For me it was very insulting as before school I had 1.5 years experience in an office already, and an additional 2 years of experience during school where I was put in charge on a few occasions of doing all the drawings for a project, as well as a lot of other things normal student interns don't do (I had more experience than some of the graduate interns).
I understand when you get college credit for the internship, but there still should be some sort of stipend paid. At my university, internships are required, but they aren't for credit. Also, a lot of firms views on interns are very unbecoming to the profession. Its no wonder that 75% of those who do get an architecture degree go into other fields. Its not sustainable when you treat your future generations like crap, when you should be training them for the future. Its almost as if it has only become about money, and if you can't make them money, they treat you like crap.
I could definitely go on further with a diatribe of the architectural profession in America today, but I'm not going to.
I cannot help but register to reply to a topic that has been important to me recently, seeing as how I have only been offered unpaid positions so far in my job search.
I find architect's defensiveness about not paying their interns troubling, and I think that other industries that do run unpaid internships might give an idea of what the department of labor thinks an appropriate one might look like. No, not some insane equally or more unethical media or arts internship that places you as glorified secretary in the name of making precious contacts to avoid the big graduation weed-out. We are in a “Profession”, so how about engineering as a comparison.
A friend of mine took an unpaid internship while she was in school (high school!) at a chemical engineering department in a big bad oil company that I will not name. While there she was educated on the operation of the company and taught software and technical information. While not given any "real" work, she left not only much more knowledgeable about the industry in both professional and technical areas, but also much more enthusiastic about the profession as well. This is how to run an unpaid internship. You are training and recruiting talent. If it's just some sort of obligation, than don't do it. You are only barely helping a student or graduate by "letting" him or her poke around at a door schedule or build a model out of card-stock, and you are certainly helping prolong an industry problem. And lets do away with the notion that a 3 month unpaid internship doing low-responsibility tasks like study models and door schedules at a generic-design architecture firm is time well spent educationally. You can teach someone to do both of these things in a matter of days. It seems like many firms don't even have their interns do things they don't already know how to do. You could have spent that time really educating them, and they might have wanted to come back to work for you, now pre-trained (so now you don't have to do it at entry-level pay).
"Oh but there is so much more money in engineering, that's how they can afford to run such a program!". This is both true and false. Its true that an oil company (and to a lesser extent an engineering firm) has a lot of money to throw around. What is not true is that the salaries of engineers and architects are extraordinarily different*. So how come my college roommate got paid more for his summer internship at a mechanical engineering firm (doing solid works modeling while receiving job training) than I did in an entry-level architecture position? I don't think its because engineering graduates are better prepared for their profession (which itself is quite a statement about the "professional" degree we receive), since many engineers are trained intensively by the firms they work for after graduation. In fact, I don't know why it is, but I know that its worth looking further at, and the bottom line is that I have little sympathy for any firm that pays its higher level staff upper-middle-class / upper-class salaries while regulating its interns to slightly above the poverty line.
I can see my rant is quickly becoming more about salary in general. I am beginning to think that I was deceived very early on in school about architecture not being the sport of the rich anymore. Like Joshua, who's sentiments I echo, I could go on about this daily (with many more parentheses and asterisks). I wont, but I do wonder if there is growing discontent regarding these issues amongst younger people. Too bad as soon as we get a taste of sweet sweet money and a senior design position the whole cycle will start over again.
*The Department of Labor gives this information about the middle 50% of salaries of the following professions: Architect: $53,480 -- $91,870, Mechanical Engineer: $61,220 --- $96,740, Chemical Engineer: $70,350 -- $108,470.
The most troubling thing for me about these unpaid "internships" is the fact that some of these small to mid-size firms are looking for "interns" with 2-5 years of experience to work for free.
I recently confronted a principal from a New York firm through a response from a Craigs List ad. I grilled him about the fact that he was looking for an "intern" with the job description of a Project Architect to work for free.
His response: "Everyone has to pay their dues! Enjoy Unemployment!"
FWIW - We NEVER are looking for interns where we wish to not pay them for their services. We just offer a place the college students can learn. The school asks us to do this for them and once a year for about 3 mths we have an unpaid intern here.
"Everyone has to pay their dues! Enjoy Unemployment!"
ha, yeah that is not surprising really
paying dues is not being a project architect, paying dues is working on a door schedule or rest room details
of course, any principal who would say something like that is obviously not one to ever work for
you just have to ask these guys if they are doing all these projects for free that you are working on. Because otherwise, its a joke if they expect someone to work for free
Don't get me wrong. I would never have any intention of working for such a sweat shop.
I am employed right now for a pretty decent organization and frequently my job (staffing) requires me to scout out talent from the younger generation. And sometimes that search leads me to to CL where I see some of these job listings. So in solidarity with the people who have been made to feel that their experience, skills, and talents are worth nothing, I feel compelled to lash out on some of their "leaders." If they can't afford to pay people, they shouldn't be hiring.
You can just do any CL job search on CL and you will see how many of these unpaid "internships" there are... It's quite sad.
The good news is people are hiring so they shouldnt have to put up with it. We just had our quarterly "all hands" meeting and it was said in that meeting that we will be growing our staff in 2011 because of the massive backlog we have. Apparently many of our major competitors have been hiring people s...l...o...w...l...y.
I think what is broken in the architect's internship model is highlighted nicely by weAREtheSTONES above (sorry to pick on you). But an internship where one is only given tasks they can't screw up is not the point. Isn't the point to get exposure to the things you don't know how to do?
Given - you hit on this point too, thanks. And building on what you said, I had an internship with a civil engineer. It was certainly a different experience than my other internships (those for architects). At the engineering firm I was treated as a young professional working to gain access to to the inner workings of a complicated industry. The engineers I worked for made it their moral obligation to expose me to what they thought I needed to find success in complicated industry, not what they thought I couldn't screw up. Note I said this was a moral decision, not monetary. I think they were tickled at the idea of taking a young clueless architect and getting the first chance to show her the industry thru their eyes. On the other hand, at the architect's firm, I was treated like a punk ass kid who needed to be continuously reminded how worthless and naive I was and that my fancy design education was completely inadequate and therefore I was not entitled to exposure to the industry I wished to work in beyond the scraps of isolated tasks thrown my way. Very different ways of doing the same thing, and I find the architect's internship model to be very self-defeating, serving NOT the needs of the intern, the profession, nor the general public, but rather the ego of the architect who gets off on the cluelessness of a student. Sound about right?
yes, Strawbeary, that does sound about right in some places it seems.
It does seem that it can be hit or miss with architects who have young professionals working with them. Hopefully the next generation can realize this and not continue the trend. Maybe if we all learn what "paying our dues" actually means, we can get past this type of nonsense
med.
"So in solidarity with the people who have been made to feel that their experience, skills, and talents are worth nothing, I feel compelled to lash out on some of their "leaders." If they can't afford to pay people, they shouldn't be hiring."
haha, that is awesome of you. You should also mention to them that they shouldnt call it "hiring". If you dont pay someone, you really havent hired them for anything.
Here is a perfect example of where an office is disguising their ad for unpaid labor, as "opportunity for internships". They claim that they will provide you with a stipend and college credit, which I dont doubt they will. However, if you read the fine print they want someone that is proficient in all sorts of office software as well as someone willing to work FULL TIME. Obviously, if you're a student in arch. school, there's no way in hell you can work full time when you have crits coming up.
This isn't this first time I've seen I-Beam come around looking for free labor on websites. What's puzzling is also that they want you to submit a portfolio of work. From my experiences in offices, I've become leery of submitting work blindly, as you dont really know where your intellectual property ultimately ends up. In other words, they dont wanna pay for full time work, yet they wanna be able to see if you're "good enough" to work for free.
A resume and cover letter should be enough to get an interview, but when they wanna see the goods up front just to be able to work full time for free, I draw the line. Beggars cant be choosy. Sheesh.
a full portfolio seems a bit much. I think 2-3 pages as a sample of your work should be all you ever send in with a resume, then bring your full portfolio to the actual interview if you get it.
While i wouldnt be worried about them stealing your work or ideas, that just seems like a big hassle to send a full portfolio to every firm you want to interview with. They are not going to look at the full portfolio of everyone who sends an application to them. At most, you will be lucky if they scan 2-3 pages quickly.
And i agree, for someone not even offering to pay you, i wouldnt send them a portfolio before an interview. Just bring a hard copy to show them at the interview at most. Of course it stands to reason, that if they wont even be paying you, they shouldnt really need to see your work first
Oct 12, 10 4:50 pm ·
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Can Student Interns Work for Free?
Yes they can:
http://www.aia.org/practicing/AIAB086222
Yes they can IF they are getting compensation in the form of academic credit in a structured program via their NAAB-accredited school.
It's a pretty simple criteria: you get paid in money, or you get paid in academic credit. Otherwise, you don't work for a scumbag that would tell you differently.
I do get paid in money, and I will tell scumbags differently
scumbag - such a fun word
Anyways, this showed up in an AIA mass email that would normally go straight to the bin, but for the eye-catching title.
NCARB is pretty clear on the matter. I'm pretty sure you can't claim unpaid internships for idp credit. I believe they say you must be 'employed' to earn training units. Perhaps just getting some experience trumps that for some interns. It's a sleazy practice anyway you cut it. The interesting part for me is that it's not the small boutique firms that do this, but the high power firms with plenty of revenue.
to be honest, i think the flsa requirements for student internships are fairly inane. why on earth would a firm take on an intern that was not doing productive work? professional offices are not classrooms or babysitting services. it seems like the value of having a student intern, for both the intern and the office, is to have him or her doing productive work. i'm opposed to unpaid labor, but an unpaid student internship is a completely different beast, and in my opinion, the law simply doesn't understand the difference.
We get an intern from the UC system once a year. they have to come here twice a week. we dont pay them. they pay UC for their education. they must intern at a professional architecture firm for a 3 credit class in school. The school asks alumni who have firms in the area to do it for them...and we do. Trust me, most of them dont have a clue of what they are doing - we usually get them to pick up redlines on a door schedule or a sheet index....something thats hard to screw up and easy for us to check.
I had a firm offer me an unpaid internship (but not one where the experience and who it was would have made up for it). I think the practice is bad, and should be illegal. For me it was very insulting as before school I had 1.5 years experience in an office already, and an additional 2 years of experience during school where I was put in charge on a few occasions of doing all the drawings for a project, as well as a lot of other things normal student interns don't do (I had more experience than some of the graduate interns).
I understand when you get college credit for the internship, but there still should be some sort of stipend paid. At my university, internships are required, but they aren't for credit. Also, a lot of firms views on interns are very unbecoming to the profession. Its no wonder that 75% of those who do get an architecture degree go into other fields. Its not sustainable when you treat your future generations like crap, when you should be training them for the future. Its almost as if it has only become about money, and if you can't make them money, they treat you like crap.
I could definitely go on further with a diatribe of the architectural profession in America today, but I'm not going to.
I cannot help but register to reply to a topic that has been important to me recently, seeing as how I have only been offered unpaid positions so far in my job search.
I find architect's defensiveness about not paying their interns troubling, and I think that other industries that do run unpaid internships might give an idea of what the department of labor thinks an appropriate one might look like. No, not some insane equally or more unethical media or arts internship that places you as glorified secretary in the name of making precious contacts to avoid the big graduation weed-out. We are in a “Profession”, so how about engineering as a comparison.
A friend of mine took an unpaid internship while she was in school (high school!) at a chemical engineering department in a big bad oil company that I will not name. While there she was educated on the operation of the company and taught software and technical information. While not given any "real" work, she left not only much more knowledgeable about the industry in both professional and technical areas, but also much more enthusiastic about the profession as well. This is how to run an unpaid internship. You are training and recruiting talent. If it's just some sort of obligation, than don't do it. You are only barely helping a student or graduate by "letting" him or her poke around at a door schedule or build a model out of card-stock, and you are certainly helping prolong an industry problem. And lets do away with the notion that a 3 month unpaid internship doing low-responsibility tasks like study models and door schedules at a generic-design architecture firm is time well spent educationally. You can teach someone to do both of these things in a matter of days. It seems like many firms don't even have their interns do things they don't already know how to do. You could have spent that time really educating them, and they might have wanted to come back to work for you, now pre-trained (so now you don't have to do it at entry-level pay).
"Oh but there is so much more money in engineering, that's how they can afford to run such a program!". This is both true and false. Its true that an oil company (and to a lesser extent an engineering firm) has a lot of money to throw around. What is not true is that the salaries of engineers and architects are extraordinarily different*. So how come my college roommate got paid more for his summer internship at a mechanical engineering firm (doing solid works modeling while receiving job training) than I did in an entry-level architecture position? I don't think its because engineering graduates are better prepared for their profession (which itself is quite a statement about the "professional" degree we receive), since many engineers are trained intensively by the firms they work for after graduation. In fact, I don't know why it is, but I know that its worth looking further at, and the bottom line is that I have little sympathy for any firm that pays its higher level staff upper-middle-class / upper-class salaries while regulating its interns to slightly above the poverty line.
I can see my rant is quickly becoming more about salary in general. I am beginning to think that I was deceived very early on in school about architecture not being the sport of the rich anymore. Like Joshua, who's sentiments I echo, I could go on about this daily (with many more parentheses and asterisks). I wont, but I do wonder if there is growing discontent regarding these issues amongst younger people. Too bad as soon as we get a taste of sweet sweet money and a senior design position the whole cycle will start over again.
*The Department of Labor gives this information about the middle 50% of salaries of the following professions: Architect: $53,480 -- $91,870, Mechanical Engineer: $61,220 --- $96,740, Chemical Engineer: $70,350 -- $108,470.
The most troubling thing for me about these unpaid "internships" is the fact that some of these small to mid-size firms are looking for "interns" with 2-5 years of experience to work for free.
I recently confronted a principal from a New York firm through a response from a Craigs List ad. I grilled him about the fact that he was looking for an "intern" with the job description of a Project Architect to work for free.
His response: "Everyone has to pay their dues! Enjoy Unemployment!"
FWIW - We NEVER are looking for interns where we wish to not pay them for their services. We just offer a place the college students can learn. The school asks us to do this for them and once a year for about 3 mths we have an unpaid intern here.
"Everyone has to pay their dues! Enjoy Unemployment!"
ha, yeah that is not surprising really
paying dues is not being a project architect, paying dues is working on a door schedule or rest room details
of course, any principal who would say something like that is obviously not one to ever work for
you just have to ask these guys if they are doing all these projects for free that you are working on. Because otherwise, its a joke if they expect someone to work for free
Exactly what marmkid said.
med., working for that asswipe would have been a nightmare. Fuck' em. Or better yet, report him.
Don't get me wrong. I would never have any intention of working for such a sweat shop.
I am employed right now for a pretty decent organization and frequently my job (staffing) requires me to scout out talent from the younger generation. And sometimes that search leads me to to CL where I see some of these job listings. So in solidarity with the people who have been made to feel that their experience, skills, and talents are worth nothing, I feel compelled to lash out on some of their "leaders." If they can't afford to pay people, they shouldn't be hiring.
You can just do any CL job search on CL and you will see how many of these unpaid "internships" there are... It's quite sad.
The good news is people are hiring so they shouldnt have to put up with it. We just had our quarterly "all hands" meeting and it was said in that meeting that we will be growing our staff in 2011 because of the massive backlog we have. Apparently many of our major competitors have been hiring people s...l...o...w...l...y.
I think what is broken in the architect's internship model is highlighted nicely by weAREtheSTONES above (sorry to pick on you). But an internship where one is only given tasks they can't screw up is not the point. Isn't the point to get exposure to the things you don't know how to do?
Given - you hit on this point too, thanks. And building on what you said, I had an internship with a civil engineer. It was certainly a different experience than my other internships (those for architects). At the engineering firm I was treated as a young professional working to gain access to to the inner workings of a complicated industry. The engineers I worked for made it their moral obligation to expose me to what they thought I needed to find success in complicated industry, not what they thought I couldn't screw up. Note I said this was a moral decision, not monetary. I think they were tickled at the idea of taking a young clueless architect and getting the first chance to show her the industry thru their eyes. On the other hand, at the architect's firm, I was treated like a punk ass kid who needed to be continuously reminded how worthless and naive I was and that my fancy design education was completely inadequate and therefore I was not entitled to exposure to the industry I wished to work in beyond the scraps of isolated tasks thrown my way. Very different ways of doing the same thing, and I find the architect's internship model to be very self-defeating, serving NOT the needs of the intern, the profession, nor the general public, but rather the ego of the architect who gets off on the cluelessness of a student. Sound about right?
yes, Strawbeary, that does sound about right in some places it seems.
It does seem that it can be hit or miss with architects who have young professionals working with them. Hopefully the next generation can realize this and not continue the trend. Maybe if we all learn what "paying our dues" actually means, we can get past this type of nonsense
med.
"So in solidarity with the people who have been made to feel that their experience, skills, and talents are worth nothing, I feel compelled to lash out on some of their "leaders." If they can't afford to pay people, they shouldn't be hiring."
haha, that is awesome of you. You should also mention to them that they shouldnt call it "hiring". If you dont pay someone, you really havent hired them for anything.
Here is a perfect example of where an office is disguising their ad for unpaid labor, as "opportunity for internships". They claim that they will provide you with a stipend and college credit, which I dont doubt they will. However, if you read the fine print they want someone that is proficient in all sorts of office software as well as someone willing to work FULL TIME. Obviously, if you're a student in arch. school, there's no way in hell you can work full time when you have crits coming up.
http://newyork-architects.com/jobs/details/4131_Intern/pageRef:jobs
This isn't this first time I've seen I-Beam come around looking for free labor on websites. What's puzzling is also that they want you to submit a portfolio of work. From my experiences in offices, I've become leery of submitting work blindly, as you dont really know where your intellectual property ultimately ends up. In other words, they dont wanna pay for full time work, yet they wanna be able to see if you're "good enough" to work for free.
A resume and cover letter should be enough to get an interview, but when they wanna see the goods up front just to be able to work full time for free, I draw the line. Beggars cant be choosy. Sheesh.
a full portfolio seems a bit much. I think 2-3 pages as a sample of your work should be all you ever send in with a resume, then bring your full portfolio to the actual interview if you get it.
While i wouldnt be worried about them stealing your work or ideas, that just seems like a big hassle to send a full portfolio to every firm you want to interview with. They are not going to look at the full portfolio of everyone who sends an application to them. At most, you will be lucky if they scan 2-3 pages quickly.
And i agree, for someone not even offering to pay you, i wouldnt send them a portfolio before an interview. Just bring a hard copy to show them at the interview at most. Of course it stands to reason, that if they wont even be paying you, they shouldnt really need to see your work first
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