La Roche Interior Design student wins
William Slattery Student Merit Award
On December 1, 2017 Andrea Luciano (pictured right) was the recipient of the annual William Slattery Student Merit Award. This award was established in 2017 by the ASID Pennsylvania West Chapter Board to honor the memory of William Slattery, dear family friend to the design community in western Pennsylvania. His memory will live on to celebrate students in their junior or senior years who are in good academic standing and who have distinguished themselves through passion for leadership and service in the ASID Student Chapter at their interior design schools.
“A topic that I am beyond passionate about is community” states Ms. Luciano. “I make an effort to be involved in numerous ASID events as well as other industry-related occasions and gatherings. I am constantly trying to get other students to join in.”
According to Associate Professor and Interior Design Department Chair Nicole Bieak Kreidler, Ph.D., Andrea “is always encouraging other students to be active within the Pittsburgh design community. She is always willing to volunteer her time with any departmental initiatives and is always mentoring underclassmen.”
La Roche Interior Design student is awarded PAVE Student Aid Grant
On November 30, 2017 Mikayla Ambler (pictured left) was awarded a grant from the 2017 PAVE Student Aid Program to further her education. PAVE is a non-profit education foundation with the mission of supporting students studying in the field of retail design and planning and visual merchandising.
“After discovering that people spend 90% of their time indoors, I decided to pursue the career of Interior design at La Roche College” says Ms. Ambler. “I never realized how much design could affect a person’s life until I had recently started researching for my senior thesis.” Her senior thesis focuses on disaster relief and climate gentrification. For the second part of her thesis, she plans “to create an ‘uplifting’ center to not only educate the community in preparation for a disaster, but also be a safe place of refuge that they will be comfortable in, in the case of a disaster reoccurring. With these centers being within communities, it may make the disaster less traumatizing and increase the recovery process by allowing the survivors to remain in their area and help as a community to bounce back. We cannot change the events of the past, but we can prepare and design for the future. “
“Mikayla is a very passionate student and brings a sense of empathy to her design work. She takes criticism well and is able to turn it into growth, a skill that not many students are able to appreciate. She is very passionate about design and brings new ideas to the table at critique” states Associate Professor and Interior Design Department Chair Nicole Bieak Kreidler, Ph.D.
