Imagining a brighter future, one intern at a time
Cibola senior is interning with a design studio thanks to her studies at STEdy, which hopes to see more opportunities like this in yuma’s future
An internship is at the very core of career and technical education (CTE) according to Southwest Technical Education District of Yuma (STEDY) Superintendent Tom Tyree. Why? Because it’s hands-on learning by doing, and as STEDY continues to grow, he hopes to foster a deeper partnership between business and education so that students can have access to practical mentorship and businesses can receive more recognition in the process.
“The thing that’s really important here (for internships and clinicals) is the word, ‘mentoring,’” he said. “The idea of somebody mentoring another person–typically, an older person who’s more experienced being able to mentor or coach or help people is another reason why we feel the learning’s enhanced. And not only do the students benefit from that, but the person offering the internship, they stand to benefit.”
And from the classes offered in person at the STEDY office, one such opportunity is making all the difference for a star student in Erick Olivas’ animation class. When Jon Perry, president and founder of Imaginary Friends Design Studios in Yuma, spoke with the class one day, Isabel Patchen knew she just had to seek an internship opportunity at Imaginary Friends.
“It wasn’t just handed to me, you know? I had to take the
initiative,” Patchen said. “Jon Perry came and spoke to us in class and Mr. Olivas told us that he has offered internships to animation students at STEDY before. So a kid can hear that and they can be like, ‘Oh, cool’ and then they don’t do anything with it. But I really wanted it and I got up and I talked to him after class and I told him that I would be interested in it. Everyone here at STEDY helped me work towards it, get in contact with him and get an interview. And I’m really appreciative for [their support]. I was scared, but I just took that step forward.”
Patchen’s initiative and ambition are traits that STEDY leadership have found to be characteristic of her. As she graduates with a diploma from Cibola High School this month, she also graduates from Arizona Western College with a general Associate of Arts degree. And having earned a $2,500 YumaCats scholarship to the University of Arizona, she’ll be majoring in Illustration and Design and minoring in Physiology. Her end goal? To become a medical illustrator, and she might like to get a Master’s in medical illustration someday too.
“So have you ever gone into a doctor’s office and then you see posters on the wall with diagrams? It kind of gives you an idea of what the doctors could be doing to you in that office,” Patchen said. “... But that’s just like the tip of the iceberg. You know, there are also textbooks for college that medical illustrators are needed for, there’s surgical procedures that medical animators can do and it really expands the realm of medical knowledge by providing visuals. Because if you’re studying, say, the brain in an anatomy class, you’re like, ‘Okay, you’re telling me where this is, but what does it look like?’ Not every kid can just whip out a brain and look at it, so that’s where medical illustrators and animators come in. They provide a different aspect of medicine to anyone.”
Although Patchen’s main interest is in illustration, she explained that animation is a very important skill to have. By taking the animation class at STEDY, she’s expanding her horizons so that when she applies for work in medical illustration, she’ll have certifications and a portfolio to prove she can do more than just draw. The course itself offers great opportunity to branch out in a wide variety of directions.
“Here at STEDY, we’re pretty much focusing on a lot of different topics,” Olivas said. “We are one of the first–if not the first–animation programs here in the county. And we cover anything from frame-by-frame animation to graphic design. We do a lot of 3D modeling and simulations. Before in the past two or three months, we’ve worked with TV ads and we’ve worked on ads that could be brought over to social media. We also do a little bit of work that will carry over to marketing for products.”
Now in its fourth year, the program is available for high school students and its main purpose is to enable students to create, but Olivas noted that the demand for animation work has increased of late–not just in entertainment, but even in careers like cyber criminology too. Participating in an internship, then, helps students like Patchen apply their knowledge and skills to real industry work. And while her internship at Imaginary Friends isn’t directly related to medical illustration, she finds it a lot more relevant than a job she might find to earn cash.
“I’m very excited,” she said. “I love gaining experience and that’s why I wanted to get that internship. At my interview with Jon Perry, he said, ‘I hope you realize that this is an unpaid internship.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I was expecting that. I wanted this for the experience. If I wanted to make money, I wouldn’t be looking at an internship, I’d be looking at a job in a restaurant or something.’ So, yeah, I wanted to seek out that internship for the experience; I feel like it would really benefit me on resumes and also for the knowledge.”
At Imaginary Friends, Perry’s business helps other businesses create unique, visual brand identities and it provides tools for small-to-medium business to promote themselves or their products. Perry’s other business, Print Zoom, is a print shop, which offers a physical component to the work done at Imaginary Friends as needed.
So far, Patchen’s internship there has served more as an independent study since she hasn’t graduated yet. Currently, she gets to see what people at Imaginary Friends are working on and learn from them. She’s also worked on a few of her own projects like designing shirts for the jazz band at Cibola and received advice for improvement.
“It’s just been a really nice environment here at Imaginary Friends,” she said. “I do feel very welcomed and I’m able to get up and talk to the people here, see what they’re working on. Oftentimes, I asked Jon for advice on what I’m working on and he gives it to me. We’re able to discuss what I’m working on, how I can improve it and what I can do next. I think it’s really nice because there are environments where you speak up and you ask for help and they immediately shut you down and then you no longer want to ask for help, but it’s not like that here. It’s a very encouraging environment.”
Very soon, however, she’ll be spending more time at the business and Perry will help develop a new plan for what her internship will look like to best benefit her.
“Shortly before that, we will reevaluate her goals at that time and develop two or three milestones that she would like to accomplish while her internship is going on here,” Perry said. “And we’ll give her the time, tools and resources to accomplish those milestones and anything else that we can do, we’ll do because we know she’s destined for great things, and we just want to help her along her path.”
Perry, who’s been in business for nearly 20 years, finds that internships offer a wealth of benefits for participants. Not only do interns get to practice their skills, they learn soft skills needed to work in the industry and they learn about business. Mentioning that education has seemed to become more about checking off boxes in a master list, Perry stated that there are lots of skills to learn in between the boxes: from learning how to engage in civil discourse and receiving criticism without defensiveness to breaking down terminology in ways that fit the situation.
“I know that if [Patchen] had an internship someplace else, they may focus on turning out product at a high speed despite quality,” Perry said. “Some places are like that. I know at other larger institutions that have interns, their whole thing is to get people to get out of their comfort zone … We are happy with what we’re able to offer those who are here in Yuma and look forward to being able to see what we can do to push that stuff forward. Because realistically, if we want people to stay in Yuma, then we need to be able to provide them opportunities. And we’re only going to be able to do that by growing them.”
Perry identified Yuma Regional Medical Center as a great example for how their programs with high schools and college have resulted in nurses who don’t want to immediately leave Yuma. In the creative community, he wants to foster that and give people a reason to return to Yuma even after college.
“If anything else, I encourage other businesses to explore partnerships for CTE,” he said. “There is so much opportunity. When I was a kid–I’m at the tail end of Gen X–everything I heard about my elder peers was, ‘They’re a bunch of slackers, they don’t do anything.’ And yet, Gen Xers came up with Google. Gen Xers came up with a lot of stuff that just didn’t happen in a traditional path. I think even more so today, we’re no longer in a go-to-high school, go-to-college to get a good-paying job system. The cost of education has skyrocketed over the last several years: my freshman tuition at ASU in the ‘90s was $1,100 a semester.”
Comparing Perry’s figure of $1,100, a resident student would now pay at least $5,489 per semester, which speaks to the increased need for accessible educational and developmental opportunities–especially in one’s community. That’s why Perry hopes to make a change in offering internships and that’s why Tom Tyree of STEDY hopes to see more businesses in the community collaborating with STEDY to offer more internships.
“The real story here is that if you want to play an important role in students’ lives, let us know and we’ll hook you up,” Tyree said. “We want to create opportunities to provide internships and as we grow our program, then that’s going to be more opportunities for more areas for students to get internships and clinicals, and for businesses to benefit and receive recognition for their involvement.”