feature / students / alumni / internships / media-design-practices / diversity
April 08, 2024
By Solvej Schou
Images courtesy of Giah Kim

Mentorship Program pairs students with mentors: Jerron Hess and Karen Kuo

This story is part of a series on mentors and mentees in ArtCenter’s Career and Professional Development (CPD) Mentorship Program. In the program, students have the opportunity to be mentored by ArtCenter’s alumni and industry partners. Students apply during the late Spring and early Summer terms to be paired with a mentor for 10 weeks in the Fall term.  

For graduate Media Design Practices student Giah Kim, meeting weekly online with first-time Mentorship Program mentor Nicci Yin (MFA 18 Media Design Practices), a Seattle-based research designer at Meta’s Reality Labs, has been impactful both personally and professionally.   

“My favorite part is sharing my concerns with someone who understands and went through this process, as an alum,” says Kim. “Nicci has guided me in maintaining a balance between industry and academic perspectives in my projects. Her insights, considering my limited work experience, have been invaluable in identifying areas for improvement and refining my work.”

Yin’s experience includes having worked as a digital designer at the brand and digital design studio Shore and as a user experience designer at the product innovation lab Piktorlabs. At Meta’s Reality Labs, she is part of an interdisciplinary team that prototypes and proposes future extended reality (XR) interactions.
 
“One of the topics that Giah and I chat about the most is how to set and realign expectations around the transition between graduate school and a professional career,” says Yin. “We’ve looked at Giah’s interests and student projects and talked about how to reframe them to highlight Giah’s skills and processes.”
 
For their weekly meetings, Kim and Yin keep a Google slide deck to keep track of agendas, and as documentation for Kim to refer to in the future.
 
“The Mentorship Program focuses on preparing students for their careers, enabling them to explore possibilities and expand their creative network,” says Career and Professional Development Director Alysia Alex. “It’s also a way for our generous mentors to give back.” Many mentee and mentor pairs maintain contact even after the program ends. When students apply for internships and first jobs, their mentors often provide support, industry connections, and more. Occasionally, a mentee and mentor pair will end up working together professionally.

After graduating, Kim intends to pursue a career as a user experience designer or a prototyper, while also being involved in creative art projects. Kim’s student projects include AR Pet, an augmented reality companion, and BLOMs (Bio-technological Living Olfactory Memory system), a smell memory storage system that creates an interplay between human experience and technological advancement.  

“My emphasis lies in crafting a sense of aliveness and incorporating joy and sensory pleasure into everyday experiences through user engagement and prototyping,” says Kim.  

Kim’s passion and projects as a current graduate student have in turn inspired Yin, as an alum.  

“It’s refreshing to see projects that are as experimental and weird—in the best way possible—as Giah’s!” says Yin. “Through talking to Giah, I’ve enjoyed being exposed to ideas and processes that Giah and Giah’s peers work on in Media Design Practices.”