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12 tips for new design graduates

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MY PERSONAL ADVICE TO NEW GRADUATES STARTING THEIR CAREERS IN ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

My undergraduate architecture students have finished up their thesis and are getting ready to graduate. I’m proud of all of their successes, and eventually they will all have rosy futures, but right now they face a somewhat grim outlook… the industry is suffering from the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic and jobs may be hard to come by. I wrote this piece partly to relieve some of their anxieties. It’s not going to get them jobs but once they do, it can help them transition into it a little easier.

In truth, I could’ve written this article several years ago. I have often given my advice to graduating students as they start their careers, and yes, mostly the advice is unsolicited. But I suddenly felt like writing it now and I hope my students (and any students who might read this in the future) will excuse my presumptuousness.

Aside from architecture, I teach and advise students from other design disciplines, so I want to disclaim that this article is mostly focused on architecture and interior design graduates, primarily because the advice I’m offering is based upon a certain kind of job profile in small to medium companies which form the bulk of architecture and interiors practices. In contrast, my students from product design or communication design generally go on to work in large corporate offices and although there may be some common carryover, these tips are more suited to smaller workplaces. So, if you’re not an architect or interior designer, take from it whatever you can. I hope it helps.

Here’s my dozen personal tips to all of you who are about to enter the professional world of architecture and design.

#1 DON’T RUSH INTO WORKING

Sometimes I wonder why students want to start work almost immediately after they graduate. I wonder why they don’t want to take some time off to recover from a rigorous and stressful design education. Once you start your career, you fall under the constraints of a traditional working life and will never get as many days off as you deserve. Take the time now to rest your brain, think about your future, work on your portfolio, travel, volunteer, or do things that a full-time job won’t allow you to do once you start working. Now I do understand that many of you need to start earning, either to support your family or to pay back your education loans. I get that, and if that’s the reason for jumping into a job right away, so be it. But if you have the time and financial standing, take some time off and travel. You may not get a chance like this again.

For the record, when I graduated, I took six months off to travel through Europe and India, with friends and later, by myself. It did cost a lot of money, most of which I put on a credit card, for which I paid dearly over the next couple of years. I don’t normally recommend students to be so financially frivolous but I’m honestly glad that I did it. I’ve never been able to have that much time and freedom since then, after 10 years of studying (!), and that small amount of credit card anxiety wasn’t that much compared to what I earned in subsequent years. And nothing compared to the experience of traveling to see places and buildings that I had only read about in textbooks. A lot of that experience has now borne fruit in my teaching career.

#2 CHOOSE A LEARNING WORKPLACE

If you can, try to work in an office that promotes a learning environment rather than a place where you’re just another CAD Monkey (as my friends and I jokingly called ourselves). Architecture has been an apprenticeship-based discipline for millennia, and employers who expect freshers to already know everything the day after graduation are not employers you want to work for. Of course, beggars can’t be choosers, so try to avoid being a beggar in the first place. Do the kind of work in college that elevates you as a candidate for better companies. Spend the time to create a portfolio that shows as much of your process work and learning as the final designed product. Do some research on how firms treat their fresh graduates. During interviews, ask questions about how the office works as a learning environment. Employers will rarely say that they’re hiring you purely to educate you, but good ones will understand that they’re making an investment in training you and will be clear about how and what they expect you to learn.

It’s often the case that small and medium firms offer better opportunities for learning than large corporate offices. There are exceptions, of course, but generally in a small office there are more diverse responsibilities and work is often shared. In larger firms, you tend to get pigeon-holed into one task that either you’re really good at or a task that is necessary but no else wants to do.

#3 MAKE A LONG-TERM COMMITMENT

One of the things that bother me as a teacher is finding out how soon my students leave jobs that they find unsatisfactory or unfulfilling. No one wants to work in a job that they don’t like, but when you just start out in your career, you also don’t really have a good idea of what you like and what you don’t. I don’t mean to sound condescending about this, but I find students nowadays to lack the patience to stick through a difficult job; many leave before a year is up, sometimes not even lasting six months. There are two problems with this. One is that architecture projects typically aren’t short projects, most last six months or more. It’s a good learning experience to work a full project cycle from start to end. Just because parts of a project aren’t fun or interesting doesn’t mean that all of it will be that way. You’re learning how to solve problems, not how to escape them. You can learn just as much from negative experiences as positive ones (if not more). 

The other reason is that an employer has invested in your training. It often takes six months just to get used to how an office works – their design process, team dynamics, hierarchy, logistics, digital systems. Typically, your first six months isn’t economically productive for your employer; they tend to spend more time and manpower in training you than they get from your actual work. As a manager, I’ve often thought it would simply be faster and easier for me to do the work myself than to check, re-check, and approve the work of a less experienced fresher. It’s harsh to say but a firm is still a business; if an employer invests in you and doesn’t get a return on that investment, it can be both emotionally and financially disappointing for everyone.

#4 PRIORITIZE LEARNING OVER COMPENSATION

This is a big one because more and more graduates have become vocal about low wages in architecture, especially for fresh graduates and interns. In another blog article, I’ve discussed in detail about why this tends to happen so I won’t get into that here. I believe that young designers deserve to be paid fairly for their time and effort, but I’ll also say that this shouldn’t become an obstacle to learning. When students come to me for advice about whether to take a low-paying offer at a good office or a higher-paying offer at a more mediocre office, I usually tell them to take what they think is fair while prioritizing a good learning experience. I wouldn’t advise anyone to work for free or for extremely low wages, but I think students should also be more realistic about their worth. The work that young graduates do in their first year of working is often not much more than drafting, and an office will usually pay accordingly. 

It’s a tough balance to strike, but I use my own experiences as an example. In almost every job I’ve taken, I’ve initially earned less than I think I deserve, but I also understand that I’m untested. An employer doesn’t know my potential yet and low margins of profitability make it difficult for an architect to gamble on paying someone more than they might be worth. So I ask for a performance review six months after I start. (Many firms already have a policy like this, which is good.) If I can prove my worth and value after six months, and if I work hard and diligently, then I’m in a better position to demand higher compensation.  This technique has worked for me for my entire career. It’s more satisfying to know I earned more because of my proven worth, not because of what’s written on my resumé. 

#5 ASK QUESTIONS BUT RESPECT THEIR TIME

Once you start working, you will undoubtedly have many, many questions. In my first job after graduating architecture school, I was very fortunate to have managers who were willing to answer my questions whenever I asked them. I only realized later how much of a disturbance and distraction that must have been for them, and I wasn’t nearly the only one – I had several friends working with me who had similar levels of experience, and who knows how many times our manager had to stop working to entertain our frequent questions. He rarely complained or told us to come back later. But once we realized that we might be distracting him, we started to do it differently… we kept a list of questions at our desks and as long as the question wasn’t urgent, we would simply add it to the list and keep working. Then at some convenient point in the day, we’d ask our manager if he could give us some time and we would ask all our questions together.

The advantage of this is that, in delaying the question sometimes it would answer itself in due course. That’s an important learning when you start your career – to balance the things you can figure out on your own with the things you genuinely need help with. It’s also a well-known advice that when you go to a colleague with a problem, try to go with at least one potential solution as well. Even if your solution is rejected, your employer will appreciate your genuine attempt to think independently. Employers tolerate questions (and often encourage them), but they also want to eventually trust you to figure it out yourself.

#6 HAVE AN ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET

I like to teach entrepreneurial practices to my students even though most will spend the first few years working for someone else. But many will likely start their own practices in due time, so it’s important to know how to be a good entrepreneur – not just about the business and finance side, but also the managerial aspect. However, the big myth is that these learnings are only valuable once you start your own practice. That is not true. A good employee who has an entrepreneurial mindset regardless of their hierarchical rank is usually recognized and rewarded eventually.

An ‘entrepreneurial mindset’ is an attitude of ownership over the work, the projects, and the general workings of any organization. It’s the idea that your work, however minor, has some reflection on the business as a whole, and that you have a share in that reputation. Maybe you don’t actually have a financial share and you’ll get paid a salary regardless, but that’s misleading because architecture firms don’t tend to have big profit margins and often have high turnover. Your salary may not reflect profit-sharing, but when profits go down for whatever reason, the employees who don’t have an attitude of ownership will likely be the first to go, the younger ones in particular. Keep a sense of pride in your work and maintain an attitude that what you do reflects on the entire organization. Believe me, in all but the most unbalanced and unfair working environments, this attitude is rewarded with better projects, more responsibilities, more compensation, and more advancement. Not only will this mindset earn you respect in your job, it will also be valuable for when you’re ultimately running your own firm.

#7 AVOID OFFICE DRAMA

Too often I hear about my students getting caught up in office politics, drama, gossip, and the many machinations and manipulations that even the smallest of offices can fall victim to. Interns and freshers often become unwitting pawns in these games, which almost always result in an unhealthy office environment, and it takes an disproportionate toll on less experienced employees. My simple advice – stay away from it. Lie low, focus on your work, and avoid getting caught in the middle of interpersonal conflicts that have little to do with you. Sometimes this isn’t easy – a young designer working on a team needs a clear channel of hierarchy, and office politics can cloud that channel. Who do you report to? Who makes decisions on a project? Whose instructions to follow? It’s best to keep a clear head and clarify any doubts in the beginning. Make sure you find out before you join on any project team who are the team leaders and what role everyone plays. If there’s any doubt, ask openly. Avoid corridor conversations and taking sides, and when you’re given instructions make sure you note them down in a personal project journal. And of course, don’t fall prey to gossip involving you or anyone else.

If you find that an office is too enmeshed in this toxic culture and it’s more than you can handle, then seek counseling from other professionals that you trust and perhaps start planning an exit strategy. But in the meantime, observe. Sometimes being observant of bad behaviour gives you a good idea of what not to do in your own practice. Many of my lessons as a professional have come from observing the behaviour of others and deciding that that is definitely what I don’t want to do. 

#8 MAINTAIN A HEALTHY WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Adding to the potential stress of office drama is an unhealthy working schedule. Many architects and designers still cling to the romantic vision of a creative practice with long, grueling working hours, late night charrettes, and last-minute deadline encroachments. There’s abundant research that shows that none of this is actually productive, and in fact becomes unnecessarily taxing on workers. In a discipline where most of your work requires your brain to be creative and innovative, it isn’t good to always be tired. Of course, I’m not saying that everyone should ideally be 9-to-5 workers, and if the pandemic has predicted anything, it’s likely that all the norms of the standard workday and workweek may be up for reconsideration soon (if not already). But don’t become a victim of ‘architecture overtime’ simply because that’s ‘how it’s done’. 

I think that sometimes many of my students leave their jobs so quickly because they get burnt out. It’s often expected for a junior designer to put in lots of work-time to impress the boss, but this has consequences in the enjoyment of the work and your motivation to do it. I don’t believe that the first year of a designer’s professional life should be spent in 16-hour working days with no social life. There are many other avenues in which you can grow in these early years. Don’t waste it all on poor time management.

#9 SUPPLEMENT YOUR OFFICE WORK WITH OTHER LEARNING

Your faculty in college always told you that a great deal of your learning will happen outside the classroom. The same is true in your professional life. You will no doubt learn a lot on the job – in fact, more intensely than in college. But you won’t learn everything there. Most offices have a very narrow way of working – they use a specific software package, they have an established process of design, they perhaps even use similar materials, details, and techniques in their architecture. It can be easy to fall into a rut of learning, but the answer isn’t necessarily to leave the job for another one. You’ll just be moving from one routine to another. So it’s important to supplement your office experience with additional learning while you still have free time and energy in your life. Take a class in something entirely different than your office work. Learn software platforms that your office doesn’t use. Go to events, conferences, and exhibitions, and travel on the weekends to visit architecture in different cities and towns. And read, read, read… stay up to date on what’s going on in the profession – both in theory and practice.

You might even decide to study something different from architecture. I strongly believe that future economies will be disruptive and volatile, so it may not be a good idea to focus all your abilities into one discipline. There’s a lot of scope for diversification within architecture, but there’s also a lot of scope outside of it. In case the industry growth declines, it’s good to learn other design disciplines, or even other business practices. The best thing about a 5-year architecture education is that it prepares you for many other related careers. Many more architects branch into other disciplines than vice versa. My personal feeling is that architects should branch into interaction design, digital experiences, environment visualization (gaming, CGI), and data visualization and analysis. A lot of the skills you need for these fields are already baked into an architecture degree, so it’s good to diversify while you can and be prepared for uncertainty.

#10 DON’T SHRINK YOUR SOCIAL CIRCLE – WIDEN IT

The great thing that university life does – especially architecture school – is that it opens up your life to new ideas, new experiences, and new people. College tends to be a time of social expansion; your social circle gets wider and encompasses more and more people, cultures, and ideas every year. 

But I’ve noticed that when students graduate, their circles tend to contract. You stay in touch with only those college friends you were really close to, and the majority of new people you meet are through work. This is understandable because after years of expansion, one tends to want to settle down and contract… especially if you’re an introvert like me. But the problem is that this is the time in which you need to actually expand your horizons. You are in an even more intense period of growth, and you need to meet more people, you need to make more connections. As we’ve said before, you may quickly find that your job doesn’t suit you and you need to find something else. At that time, it’s good to know people so that you can find better opportunities. 

You may soon become ready to start your own practice, so having a network of collaborators is seriously important; it can make or break your new career. You’ll need to know vendors, suppliers, contractors, designers, and of course, clients. So while networking is often seen as a bad word (I used to think so, and sometimes still do), I’ve found that having a solid professional network of people you like and trust can make your next role much easier to transition into. You will need the help and support of others, so build up that network and stay in an expansive social mode while you still can.

#11 SPEND YOUR FREE TIME IN WORTHWHILE CAUSES

I mentioned earlier that you should supplement your working life with learning new skills. Another thing to consider is to devote some time to charitable causes. When working to build up your career, it can be easy to get caught up in your own self, especially once you start earning your own money. There’s a ladder of consumption that’s all too easy to climb – get a new place, buy new clothes, get a new car, then get a bigger place, more clothes, a better car, and so on. I don’t want to preach and tell you how to spend your hard-earned money, but I think it’s also important to reflect on what your architecture education has given you – the power to help people and change their lives for the better. If that’s not necessarily happening in your job, then it’s good to exert that power in some other way – by volunteering your time and energy.

As an architect you have a lot of creative potential. Use that to help people. Improve homeless shelters, assist with pro bono building projects, create newsletters or flyers for non-profit NGOs. My rule of thumb is to spend at least half a day each week in some kind of voluntary, charitable project. Of course, no one is forcing you to do this, but look around you… the world is not in great shape right now. It needs creative people like you to help fix its problems, even in very small ways.

#12 BE ETHICAL IN YOUR SIDE WORK

Almost every principal architect knows that the majority of his or her employees do some work on the side. It could be charitable work as I mentioned above, or it could be the humble beginnings of your own practice. Most employers know this and look the other way. Some will explicitly tell you that it’s ok to do it as long as it’s not on ‘company time’, using company resources. It’s important to respect this, no matter how easy it is to get away with. It’s simply not fair to your employer to use their time and resources for your own projects without their explicit approval. You don’t want to start off your professional career with unethical behaviour.

You know what I’m talking about. Working on your own projects during your workday, on the office workstations and software. Printing drawings on the office plotter after hours. Just don’t do it. An employer has built up his or her practice over years, and it’s unfair to repay their investment in you in this way. Use your own resources – your own laptop and software license, and get your plots printed somewhere else. It’s not that hard to do.

Of course, the best thing is to simply be open about it and ask your boss if you can do it. Most employers will not be ok with you doing work that directly competes with them, but many employers are ok with you doing small projects that they wouldn’t take on, as long as you don’t use their resources. Some may ask for a share of the fee, or some may simply just let you do it as long as you’re open about it, and you don’t do it during office hours. I once was working on a long-term pro bono charitable project and I simply asked my boss if I could print my 4-5 sheets on the office plotter, after hours. I did it openly, and he was fine with it because it was a charitable project, and it was only a few sheets. He even sat down and hand-rendered my elevations for me (he liked to remind me how much better at drawing he was than me). 

Situations vary, and you have to carefully reflect on your specific relationship with your employer and think about how he or she would respond and whether it’s worth the risk to burn bridges like that. In the end, I feel that it’s always better to either be open about it, or simply do it all on your own time.

That’s my 12 tips (for now). You’re welcome to add more, comment, agree, disagree… anything. But regardless, I wish all my graduating students the very best for the future.

architects, please pay your interns

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My third year architecture students are supposed to start their internships at the end of this semester, and the pandemic has got them a little worried about their prospects. Last year around April and May, their seniors were stuck in a difficult situation – the lockdown here in India was in full force, and they all had to either find internships that they could do remotely or find internships in their hometowns which, for the large majority of them is here in Agra – a Tier II city in India that… erm… how do I put this… isn’t very high on the aspirational lists of places to do an architecture internship. Since the Covid pandemic had taken a major economic toll on many architecture firms who suddenly couldn’t do any work, and considering we were even wondering whether they would get internships at all, they were fortunate enough to all find positions somewhere. Now, the current batch of students is justifiably wondering whether they’ll be in the same situation in the next few months.

In such uncertain times, it’s hard to predict even a few months into the future, but I think things will be better by then, and they’ll be able to find work in other cities. The industry was hard hit by the pandemic and I don’t think it’s recovered fully yet, but things are better than they were nine months ago.

I spoke to them last week at length about preparing their portfolios, and near the end of our discussion we started talking about getting paid for internships. Yes… we opened that can of worms.

Now, before I say anything about this… this has been an oft-discussed, hot-button topic for a long time in the architecture profession (and in other design professions). There doesn’t seem to be much to add to the conversation, so I’m not entirely sure why I’m even writing this. Maybe just to put my own opinion on the record. Maybe because, despite all the debate and dialogue, we’re still nowhere near approaching any significant movement in the problem of unpaid internships in architecture.

While contemplating this topic as a blog post, I thought about starting with quotes from a few articles or opinion pieces on this topic, but… there are too many. It’s kind of like being a waiter at an all-you-can-eat buffet. You don’t need me to google that for you. Suffice to say, it’s an ugly aspect of our profession that somehow doesn’t want to go away.

In any case, my position on unpaid internships is that I’m thoroughly against it, both as a practitioner and an academic. I’ve hired interns of my own (and paid them), and I’ve sent my students out into the wild to become interns, and neither of my personas thinks it’s fair to not pay young people who perform work in your office that you’re getting paid for. If you’re not getting paid enough to pay your interns, then you have no business hiring them. Or you can take it out of your own income. I teach professional ethics in the classroom, and this is one of the clearest breaches of ethical practice that is somehow still commonplace in our profession.

That’s a rather ruthless way of putting it, I know. I have friends who run architecture practices that don’t pay interns. How can I continue to accept their behaviour in good conscience? How do I reconcile their otherwise good work with this arguably bad practice? The truth is that my position on unpaid internships is idealistically and unwaveringly clear, but I do retain some empathy for why it exists. I know that there are underlying problems in the entire profession itself that make unpaid internships a ‘necessary’ evil, and these problems don’t seem to be going away.

The central issue, of course, is that architects themselves aren’t paid enough. Given the length of their education and training, the breadth of their responsibilities, and the gravity of their legal liability in construction projects, architects are paid nowhere near what they deserve. Running an architecture practice is like riding a constant knife-edge between profitability and ruin, and the only reason we continue to flog ourselves through it is because of how stubborn we were taught to be in architecture school. That initial first year reading of The Fountainhead, as misguided as it ultimately turns out to be, makes it too hard to disassociate our internal Howard Roarks from our external selves. We’re going to make architecture, by God, even if we die trying!

But I’ll address the problem of finances in a minute. There are several other reasons people give in defence of unpaid internships, and the most common is that interns are apparently a net liability in a given architecture practice. The claim is that it costs more time, resources, and money to teach interns about the profession than the benefit derived from them. Interns (usually in their fourth year of education, here in India) are generally considered not much more than newborns in the life cycle of design maturity. They know some CAD, Sketchup, and Photoshop, and how to file away things, and perhaps know the basics of construction and materials. Interns are rarely asked to design anything, nor are they asked to manage construction. The reasoning is that the complex nuances of how to deal with labour on a job site require at least a few years of seasoning. Many architects tell me that they really don’t have the time to teach their interns anything, and the work that they do can be done by technicians and draftspersons who are already on staff and require much less oversight. In fact, some interns have told me stories about architects who, instead of paying them, demand to be paid a fee for taking on an intern. I’ve only heard about such incidents anecdotally; I can’t imagine any of my friends or colleagues being that pretentious and arrogant.

My rebuttal to this defence is that, for millennia, architecture has been a profession founded on the principle of apprenticeship. It’s only been a century or so that architects actually go to college for an architecture degree; most architecture education was on-the-job training. This is still generally true – most experienced architects will agree that the majority of what is to be learnt in architecture comes after graduation. The five-year course is just teeing up the ball for the real training-in-practice; it’s a foundation that primes you to be in a position to learn further. Given this long tradition of apprenticeship, I find it unconvincing when architects expect fresh graduates to be fully groomed for the profession. Do they think that they’re absolved completely from being part of the education of their employees? Interns are simply apprentices. They are there to learn to become architects. There’s a well-acknowledged limit to what we as educators can do to prepare them for work. College may be a safe space for students to explore and stretch themselves in their investigation of design but it can’t also provide the entirety of their practical and rational knowledge. Every architect in practice has been an intern in some way, and learned something from a working mentor in some way. This is the tradition we carry on as one of the oldest professions in the world, and we should carry it with pride. An architect who doesn’t consider it their generational responsibility to pass on what they know to intern apprentices is not worthy of holding the license they took pains to receive. They aren’t a net liability if an architect factors in their own internship, followed by hiring interns themselves… as a generational way of paying it forward.

Some practicing architects like to point out to us academics that since we get paid to teach students, then why can’t practitioners also be paid? Are they not teachers, too? This is a tu quoque fallacy of a high order. The equation isn’t anywhere near the same. Educators are paid to teach, but we don’t earn a profit from the students’ work. We’re paid regardless of the students’ performance (well, sort of), and the creative work produced by them isn’t a commodity that earns us a design fee. Practitioners, on the other hand, earn income on the basis of the work produced by the workers in their employ. If an architect receives a fee, part of that fee is assumed to go toward the architect’s overhead expenses, in this case, paying their employees. If, for example, you dine at a restaurant, and you pay a tip to a server, you expect that tip to go to the server, or at least be shared with them. You’d be furious if you tipped a server for good service and then discovered that the restaurant owner pocketed the tip for himself. Try to imagine what a client would think if you had interns working on the drawings for their project and the client learned that you weren’t sharing any of their fee with the people who were actually working on it.

Getting back to this issue of finances… Yes, I understand the low margin of profitability in running a design practice. But should that excuse the questionable ethics of unpaid internships? If you can’t pay people to do the work that earns you profit, then you need to learn how to be a better businessperson and entrepreneur. Few other industries make it a practice to make a buck on the backs of slave labour. Even companies like Amazon and Apple get heat for underpaying their workers, but no one is accusing them of not even paying them. Yet somehow this is common practice in design and architecture. Somehow, despite all our discussions about doing good for people, and designing with social conscience, and making habitats for humanity, we forget these values when it comes to simple entrepreneurial economics.

Part of the reason this practice gets perpetuated is also because interns are so willing to accept it. In countries like India, internships are required for their degree and they will be forced to take an unpaid internship if no other options are available (especially during a global pandemic). I certainly don’t blame them; I’ve done it myself. Not necessarily because there were no options, but because there are architects I really wanted to work for and I didn’t need the money. My classmates and I once worked for one of our favourite professors on a competition and he warned us that he couldn’t pay us (although the parameters for competitions are different because the architect isn’t get paid either; more on that in a minute). Ultimately at the end, he did pay us a token amount (perhaps out of guilt? a job well done?), but we willingly took the work knowing that we would get nothing in return financially. In fact, it would’ve cost us money because we had to pay for daily travel and meals. But we were just eager to work in a real-world office environment for someone we admired.

If it wasn’t for the fact that our professor did end up paying us, I might have looked back at that episode with some regret. In the capitalist world we’re forced to survive in, our worth as a working professional is measured in monetary compensation; there’s no getting past that. In most circumstances, getting paid nothing for our work implies we’re worth nothing, and that shouldn’t be true of interns. So I tell my students now that, while I understand their willingness to work for nothing because they either have no choice, or they’re getting a good experience in return, I urge them to still ask for compensation. At least put it out there for discussion; don’t just accept it out of hand. The more interns who willingly accept it, the more practitioners who will perpetuate it.

I’m not saying there isn’t dignity in working for free when the situation demands it. Throughout the entirety of my career, I’ve done some design work for free – pro bono and charitable work. Or professional courtesy for friends or family. Even as a teacher, I’ve given lectures and workshops for no compensation and I’ve invited people to do the same in my own classes. The difference, however, is that when we take on such work from others, both sides are usually on equal footing. When I invite a friend or colleague to give a guest lecture, they do it as a professional courtesy and they know I would happily do the same in return. We both choose to do it, and we accept the choice. It’s different with interns. They’re not on the same professional footing as their employers. The power dynamic is completely different, and they often take unpaid work because they have little or no choice otherwise. This is what makes it not a professional courtesy. It’s simply unfair.

One advice I give my students is to bring it up in the interview by asking “What would be my expected compensation?” as opposed to asking “Will I be compensated?”. This language at least signals to the employer that getting paid is expected and assumed. Even if they balk at it after that, the subtle message is sent. If the intern chooses to work for free at this point, at least that’s a negotiation from a reasonable baseline.

Of course, a major exception I have in my disfavour of students accepting unpaid internships is when the employers themselves are not getting paid for the work. This can cover pro bono projects, competitions, and working for charitable NGOs. If there’s no income being made on the project, then the student shouldn’t have a problem taking on unpaid work, assuming they can afford to do it. (Although to be honest, in one project in which I was doing the work pro bono, my interns on the project still got paid, simply because my reasons for doing it pro bono were not their reasons, and it would be unfair to treat it that way.)

If a salary (even a low one) for profitable work is still not in the cards, then I advise students to at least ask for a token payment that covers their expenses of daily commuting and workplace meals. I ask the same of any employers I know that are hiring my students. An intern shouldn’t have to pay out of pocket to come work for you every day. Of course, it’s hard to cover accommodation in this way. As I mentioned, many of my students aspire to work in larger cities, away from home, and this requires paying for accommodation which, in cities like Delhi and Mumbai where many good firms are situated, the housing rates are exorbitantly high. Of course, the deeper problem with this is a class issue; students who can afford to pay for accommodation and unpaid internships are the ones who will be more likely to grab such opportunities, skewing the balance inordinately against students of lower income brackets. Other biases like gender and caste also exist. In such cases, I ask students (of all income groups) to do a simple cost-benefit analysis and determine if they’re really getting what they’re paying for in this internship. And I ask them to think of their own self-worth in the larger picture.

What else can be done to solve this problem? I think in India at least, the Council of Architecture (our overall regulatory body) should acknowledge it as an ethical conundrum and take on the burden of resolving it. The Council has established minimum fees for architectural compensation, and they require all licensed architects to practice ethical behaviour. The same should be expected for internships since the Council anyway mandates them in college curricula. To me, this is a no-brainer, and I’m frankly surprised why this isn’t already on the table. Perhaps with new leadership in the COA, it will be.

There are other things being done around the world. Some countries are prohibiting architects from working on high-profile public projects if they make use of unpaid labour. Some governments have started the process of potentially banning unpaid internships outright, across all industries. Many university placement offices who help students find internships now require all recruiters to pay their interns a nominal compensation; no unpaid internships are allowed, and it’s great for a college to be in a position to enforce that. All of these are steps in the right direction. And certainly more needs to be done amongst the various professional guilds in each country, like India’s COA and the AIA in the United States. In almost all countries, the practice of architecture – unlike most other design disciplines – is tightly regulated. Why can’t this be included as well?

Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, right? So what can we academics do to help, besides having a real, honest discussion with our students about the realities of the profession they chose? Personally, I think architecture (and design) curricula teach you almost nothing about how to be a businessperson, despite the fact that a disproportionate number of architects start their own businesses earlier and more often compared to other disciplines. Students are rarely taught how to manage their personal finances and save money, how to invest, how to pitch an idea to investors, how to seek and apply for loans and funding. Few graduates are armed with the knowledge of how to set their fees, how to indemnify themselves in their contracts, how to protect their intellectual property. Most of them are taught only to do architecture, and not how to use their broad design talents to diversify into other fields that can earn them steady incomes. I’m talking about things like: managing projects; building their own work (turnkey/design-build); making images and visualisations, or designing furniture, furnishings, lighting, accessories, or fabrications. One of the architects I used to work for had a 3D printer in the office (back when they weren’t ubiquitous) that was mostly sitting around unused. I had read an article about people charging $300 a piece to make 3D-printed figurines of their friends and family members based on submitted photographs. I told my boss that he should hire someone just to do that and have that 3D printer humming 24 hours a day, churning out cheesy knick-knacks so that it could subsidise our salaries, which we often had to forgo when our clients ‘forgot’ to pay us.

Many architects and interior designers are finding other ways to earn a living besides simply offering architectural services; they have retail shops that sell furnishings and lifestyle accessories. Such a thing used to be frowned upon by my architecture professors, as if it cheapened our lofty and noble profession. I now realise that architects and designers who do this are very, very smart. Why is there such a romantic association in architecture circles of the ‘starving noble architect’? Why aren’t we taught the skills needed to earn a livelihood and follow our passions? It’s high time we teach our students to learn how to balance ideological integrity with earning an honest living. Prepare them to understand their self-worth and be confident about their expectations. There’s a lot that we as academics can do for them, if we open up our curricula and find ways to include this.

Ultimately though, architects – and architecture students – need to raise their voices in their respective guilds, associations, and other public forums to speak about this problem, and start dismantling its silent toleration. More opinions need to be heard and more rational discourse needs to happen across the board. More solutions need to be shared. We have to stop assuming someone else will fix the problem and encourage a grass roots movement to fix this. Raise awareness and speak sincerely about the problem, and take a strong stance.

So in the end, I guess that’s why I’m writing this.