(Watch excerpts from my video interview with Kyla here.)
In our Student of the Month feature, developed in partnership with the Print and Graphics Scholarship Foundation (PGSF), we profile a promising student in a graphic communications or related program. The goal is to raise awareness of graphic communications programs, as well as help students get a “leg up” on entering the industry after graduation.
This month’s Student of the Month is Kyla Vargas, a fourth-year student at the University of Houston majoring in Digital Media. Professor Jaime de Vega, on his nomination form, said of Kyla, “As University of Houston Print Ambassador, Kyla Vargas has played a pivotal role in sparking student interest in print and packaging careers, the first of three pillars of Houston’s Print & Packaging Industry Initiative. Her consistent campus outreach provides a critical peer-to-peer connection to Houston’s print community, which will help grow the print workforce.” Kyla also worked on this program with fellow student Chans Montgomery, whom we will profiling in a future Student of the Month installment.
As with a lot of our Students of the Month, her interest in graphic communication stemmed from an early creative impulse. “What attracted me to graphic arts really was my initial artistic interest in learning using technology to express myself creatively,” said Kyla. “I was first exposed to the Adobe Creative Suite back in high school, so getting my feet wet a little bit in that area of digital media really got me interested in the whole realm of digital media.” Once in college, she realized there was more to explore. “There was not just graphic design, there was also videography, and there were all these other areas of digital media that I could learn about.”
Kyla was born in Berkeley, Calif., and raised in Houston, Tex. The University of Houston was a common destination for local high school grads, her older siblings were alums, and an academic scholarship from the school sealed the deal. It was serendipity that led her to discover print and packaging. “I didn’t realize print and packaging was a career option or even an area within digital media,” she said. “I had learned about it through a Graphic Communications class that I took with Professor Mike Dawson, and when I learned that we could connect digital media with something tangible like print and packaging, I thought it was a really interesting area that I could explore.”
The University of Houston has a Print and Packaging Industry Initiative, a collaboration between PIA Mid-America and the university’s Digital Media Program. The three “pillars” of the initiative are:
- Spark student interests in print-related careers.
- Increase the professors’ awareness, knowledge, and teaching of current printing technology.
- Enrich the University of Houston’s print-related courseware.
(The UH Digital Media Advisory Boardmembers overseeing this initiative are Andy and Julie Plata, co-CEOs of The OutputLinks Communication Group.)
As part of this initiative, Kyla got an internship serving as a Print Ambassador, helping foster student engagement with Houston’s print community and organizing networking events for UH students and local printing and packaging providers, working closely with PIA Mid-America. “They saw a lot of potential in the Digital Media program and the students within it, but they realized that a lot of those students don’t even know that print/packaging is an option and that they could use their digital media skills in that industry,” she said. “We also worked on creating some educational graphics that we would post on LinkedIn and other social platforms, send out flyers and surveys, and gather some data and analyze what students know about print, how many of them know and are interested in print, and even set up some mentorships between students and the professionals as well.”
The program also helped dispel the idea that print is an obsolete technology. “What we learned from Digital Media students is that they really want to work with the leading technology in the industry, but the preconceived notion that they had with print was that it was an old, outdated industry—but that’s the opposite of true,” she said. “We quickly learned that plenty of print equipment uses some of the newest technologies.”
Kyla graduates in May and is keeping the doors open for any job opportunities that may present themselves. “I’m currently looking for any kind of graphic communications roles,” she said, “but also technical communications because I realized that I also enjoy writing and I have skills in communication, and I can combine that with my creative skills in graphic design as well. I’m also open to working in the print industry as well, any kind of digital role that I can find. And videography has also been a constant interest of mine.”
One of the challenges Kyla sees in fostering the next-generation of talent in the printing industry is the lack of education surrounding it, not just at UH, but also given the dearth of graphic communications programs in general. “Professors aren’t really encouraging students or capitalizing on graphic communications as an option,” she said. “When I was a freshman, I was told a lot about UX/UI opportunities, AR/VR opportunities, and social media marketing opportunities, but I didn’t hear much about print and packaging opportunities until I got the internship that I had last semester.”
She also encourages students and graduates to keep an open mind and continue exploring new areas. “I think the future of graphic communications is bright, so long as we have an open mind and as long as we educate and encourage each other to just explore something that you might not have initially thought of as interesting and to not stay away from something that you don’t know just because you don’t know much about that area,” she said.
We wish Kyla the best of the success as she heads out into the print industry.
Are you an educator with potential Student of the Month? We’re calling on professors and instructors to nominate students they feel are worthy of recognition and whom they feel have the potential to be tomorrow’s printing industry leaders. A nomination form is available here. Educators are welcome to nominate as many students as they see fit. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] with any questions.
