Expanding Opportunities for Students

Scholarship and Summer Programs

• The Making+Meaning (M+M) program is an avenue for creatives, college students, and inspired professionals to jumpstart their professional in architecture and design. No previous architectural experience is required to enroll. Across four weeks, participants will build a creative portfolio as they gain exposure to architectural experimentation and transformative design techniques.
  
• SCI-Arc's summer architecture program for high school students, Design Immersion Days (DID), is designed to introduce students to the career possibilities in the fields of design and architecture. The program helps to establish a greater understanding of the built environment in the community, and for some, open up the possibility of becoming a student at SCI-Arc. With the help of philanthropic support, 50% of the available seats each summer in the DID program are reserved for students on full financial need scholarships. Check out Design Immersion Days 2021.

• SCI-Arc aims to increasingly nurture the next generation of local and international architects through the Pop-Arc community engagement program. In a series of one to two-day workshops, SCI-Arc faculty and student teaching assistants develop workshops that encourage students to think critically about formal decisions, take risks, and have fun.
  
  In 2020, SCI-Arc faculty provided 12 Pop-Arc workshops to 324 students across Los Angeles and beyond in partnership with 13 community-based organizations, including Inner-City Arts and ICA LA, Young Guns Studio in Vancouver, and Bengaluru Tech Summit in Bangalore, India. The one- to two-day workshops introduce students to architectural thinking and careers in architecture and design, challenging them to think critically and take risks, while having fun doing so.

• Equity and Inclusion Scholarship
  SCI-Arc now offers full tuition for select local students who come from backgrounds that are marginalized in the field of architecture. The scholarship is applicable to undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate programs.
  
  SCI-Arc’s student population as it relates to the population of Los Angeles County shows a measurable imbalance reflective of the inequities found within the field of architecture as a whole. This scholarship hopes to begin to bridge the gaps and broach the barriers to entry that create such a quantifiable lack of representation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color within SCI-Arc’s student population and architecture at large.
• SoCalNOMA
  With the aim of establishing actions as an institution of architecture education that reflect an effort towards engendering equity and inclusion among its students, SCI-Arc has partnered with the Southern California Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (SoCalNOMA) to create a full-tuition scholarship for its undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate programs.
  
  The scholarship itself will fund full tuition for all 5 years of SCI-Arc’s B.Arch program, 2-3 years of its M.Arch 1 or 2 programs, or 1 year of its Master of Science postgraduate programs, with applicants selected on the basis of need. Applications will be open nationally, however domestic students are encouraged to apply, with priority given to Los Angeles high schoolers, to facilitate impact among the community of Southern California. Mentorship will be a critical feature of implementing the SoCalNOMA scholarship, to extend and supplement the financial support offered throughout the student’s career at SCI-Arc until graduation. To expand operations, liaison and committee positions will be created by SoCalNOMA, which will assist SCI-Arc in the selection, implementation, and management of the scholarship.