I served as the design director for LavaLab, a student startup incubator club at USC. Each year, LavaLab takes 28 students and organizes them into teams to create products solving a problem in the world.
After going through the LavaLab cohort experience, I knew I had to re-join in a leadership role. As design director, my responsibilities were twofold: mentor new designers every semester and cultivate a strong sense of community
Besides teaching a weekly design curriculum to the designers, I also wanted to provide more value through community and career-oriented events. While LavaLab had bonfires and dinners, I wanted to bring new design-specific events for the year. My goals became:
Some of my favorite events were recruitment fairs, where I got to meet designers of all backgrounds and share my experiences in Lava. During the spring, we also hosted a design expo with three other clubs to increase visibility, attracting over 100+ interested applicants.
During club cohort, we had weekly breakout meetings where I went over best practices for product and branding design. I also wanted to help the designers bond with each other, whether that was through work sessions at my apartment, dinners or excursions to the beach.
My favorite event throughout the entire year was Alumni Portfolio Night, where student could share their portfolios with USC alumni designers for feedback. This was a first of its kind event, but we got over 50+ students to share their work with each other and 3 professional product/graphic designers. As the host, it was so awesome to see creatives of all types come together to support each other.
%201.avif)
I had a lot of fun creating new communities and strengthening old ones as design director for Lavalab. As someone who was involved with community service efforts as far back as middle school, it was extremely rewarding to design experiences that helped people learn and engage with each other. I learned that community is a key principle for myself as a designer.
Shoutout to the rest of LavaLab eboard. Best to ever do it.