Our Department's Culture
Immerse yourself in a collaborative, dynamic, and diverse ecosystem.
Put a bunch of students and faculty together with a shared passion for design and a vision to impact the world, and you’ll find a welcoming, lively, inspiring, and fun learning environment. That’s our department! We’re a collaborative discipline that requires ideation for innovative solutions to complex problems. To put it more simply – we enjoy working together to come up with awesome ideas, and then flush out the pieces to design and build them.
Our glue is more than just an application to stick model pieces together.
Develop bonds with fellow students, faculty, and professionals that will last well beyond graduation. When you’re working close together on projects and providing thoughtful critiques during presentations, you end up rooting for each other to succeed. This isn’t a competition. It’s a collective movement to a higher level of greatness.
A welcoming environment where all ideas have merit.
This is where we roll our sleeves up and sharpen our minds. Within each studio class, with an intimately small student-to-faculty ratio, everyone offers their perspectives of each other’s work in a fluid, welcoming environment. We embrace failure as an opportunity to learn. We do not believe in perfection. Everyone engaged in this studio process is improved because of it.
A large campus experience, set in a small town community, within a close-knit department.
Experience the vibrant energy of the 2nd largest university in the SEC, with a diversity of people, ideas, culture, opportunities, sports, and organizations. And benefit from the comforts of a small and supportive community, between two major Midwest markets. We’re in the middle of the country, where people and ideas from all over come together.