The Problem with Professional Labels

In the last year I’ve become a sort of an academic freelancer, teaching classes and workshops at various colleges on a contract basis. In order to reach out to different institutions for work opportunities, I’ve had to develop a way to “sell myself” and amongst the many difficulties for someone like me to do that, I’ve particularly grappled with the question of whether I’m an architect or a teacher. Sure, people love to say that they don’t believe in labels, and I’m no exception. But ultimately people do want to know what exactly you are, and they don’t want a long-winded explanation of it. A professional networking site like Linked In sort of requires you to indicate your “title”, and offers a wide range of readymade options. Since my career – both the academic and professional parts of it – has been somewhat complex, I chose to simplify things and just call myself an “Architect and Educator” and left it at that.

But aside from required labels, I do often wonder about my own professional identity. Am I an architect or an educator? The easy answer is “both”, of course. But I’m thinking more deeply about it. Is it really 50/50? Which do I identify with more? I need to think about this.

If I consider it chronologically, then I was an architect first (by training and then profession), and became a teacher later. I graduated from undergraduate architecture in 1998 and after working as an intern for several years and taking my registration exams, I was finally licensed as an architect in 2007. I started proper teaching a few months later, working as a part-time adjunct faculty at my alma mater about 2-3 days a week. So even though I worked in the field of architecture for several years before teaching, I could only legally call myself an architect a few months before I started teaching, and even then I was only teaching part-time. So, am I an architect because that’s what I was trained for, and that’s what I was first?

In 2009 when I moved to India, I started teaching full-time (mostly by necessity) and enjoyed it so much that I didn’t really look back at full-time practice again. A few stints here and there, working on projects as a consultant, but for the last 12 years, I’ve been a full-time academic. So, if you consider what I am currently, then am I primarily a teacher?

What about the fact that I teach… you know… architecture? The two labels are not as distinct as they might appear because while I may have been an architect first and took up teaching later in life, I didn’t stop being an architect. So that’s a further argument for putting the architect label above the teaching label – one sort of encompasses the other. Or it furthers the argument to just say that I’m both?

But it gets more complicated than that. Because I don’t just teach architecture; I also teach design. And architecture is just one of the many design disciplines. So am I then a designer above all? And to make it even more confusing, for a a few years I wasn’t even really a teacher but an academic administrator. When I became a Department Head and then a Dean, I did very little teaching and even less architecting, and became more of an academic strategist. But it sounds kind of pretentious to call myself an “academic”.

So when I meet new people and they ask me what I do for a living, I default to the statement “I teach architecture and design” because that neatly covers everything, but it’s still a statement and not a title. And surely, if you’ve read this far, you must surely be saying “Hey. You are overthinking this. What does it matter?” to which I have to respond that it does matter. It has to do with my self identity, and even if I only come away realising that I’m equally a teacher and an architect, that still needs to be resolved. It’s not about labels but about how I’m perceived – by myself and by others, and unless you choose to live an ascetic life, such things are still important.

I also wonder how teachers in other disciplines classify themselves. I guess every teacher has, to some extent, an expertise in something. A history professor is a historian at the root of it. An economics professor is an economist. A physics professor is a physicist. So I guess and architecture professor is, ultimately, an architect. The architect part is more definitive of what my expertise is, and I guess that’s closer to how I’m perceived professionally. The fact that I teach doesn’t make me not-an-architect, it just redefines how I practice architecture… not by designing buildings, but by teaching others to design buildings. Architecture is what I am (professionally), and teaching is what I do with it, so I guess the architect label is probably more important (and not just alphabetically).

I wonder about the rest of of you who teach. How do you identify or label yourself? By your teaching or by your discipline? By your vocation or by your profession? Please comment below (even if you’re not a teacher… or an architect…. or whatever.)