And this helps me how?
Into every professional’s life a little licensure woe must fall. The lawyers have their bar exams, doctors have their set of hoops they have to jump through, and the architects have their trials with three little letters called the ARE. The Architect Registration Examination, a blot on our world if there ever was one. Unlike the lawyers and the doctors who spend a lot on their exams and see it returned megafold if they pass, the ARE does nothing of the sort for the architects. There is rarely a large increase in our pay, something we desperately need given that the tests ensured that we are broke for a looong time.
Architecture has to be the most underpaid profession for the amount of time, effort and money invested into being one. And then after you’ve slogged through everything, you find you have to get through nine other exams. If you live in California like I do, add an oral exam to the bag of joy. Your first-born child would come into this world for less money than the cost of taking these exams, even if you threw in the cost of the after-birth diaper genie.
And there is the fabulous grey area of what it gets you. It gets you a piece of paper that now allows you to call yourself an architect. It gets you a fabulous rubber stamp that means you can now build on your own. And that’s that. If you work for someone else, it earns you the empathy of the architects who went through it before you. They feel for you and your pocket book. It earns you the awe of the younger ones who haven’t gone through it (the older ones who haven’t gone through it don’t care, they know it doesn’t make any difference anyway). Some firms couldn’t care less if you are licensed, some say that it matters tremendously to them if you, the employee, are licensed. Working for an architectural firm means there’s a very small chance that you will ever be stamping drawings, the only true time it would matter if you were licensed.
To me it is a matter of despair. I am licensed where I come from. Speaking to various people who studied architecture in several different countries, I know I had a tougher syllabus and more gruelling studying to become an architect than others. Yet, my license is not recognised in this country. Which means I’m forced to do all of it all over again and pay for it yet again.
I know you pay a price for your calling but this is ridiculous.
Summer Lightning 