(Watch excerpts from my video interview with Audrey 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 Audrey Walch, a third-year student at CalPoly majoring in Graphic Communication and minoring in Packaging. Associate Professor Dina Vees, on her nomination form, said of Audrey, “Audrey exemplifies tenacity in every challenge, demonstrating a persistent drive to achieve excellence. She is highly organized in her work, consistently managing time and responsibilities with precision.”

Like a lot of our Students of the Month, Audrey’s interest in graphic communication came out of her creative nature. “I’ve always been kind of creative, but I’m not particularly a studio arts person,” she said. “Trying to design things specifically for an application or something that has a purpose was always something that drew me.”

One of her first design projects was competing in—and winning—a wrapping paper design contest held by Premier Press. The experience was an education in and of itself. “That was my first foray into designing something with specifications,” she said. “Since it was my freshman year, when I saw that one of the specifications was ‘four-color’—which I now know means CMYK—I thought it literally meant I could only use four colors. It actually worked out because it looked very cohesive in the end.”

That led to an interest in packaging. “I looked into what Premier Press did, and they do a lot of packaging,” she said. “I was, like, whoa that stuff is so cool, designing for the way that they engineer their packaging, and that led me down a rabbit hole of packaging and packaging design. I’ve taken some packaging classes and I’m in some right now. It’s really interesting and I’m having a lot of fun with it.”

One of Audrey’s package designs.

That then led to an summer internship with Premier Press in 2025. Although they didn’t have an official internship program, Audrey met president Chris Feryn. “He was very kind and said that they really want to be able to get young people in there and teach them all about what they do,” she said. She was put on a creative team and was given a project that involved creating her own brand and developing an “influencer package” for that brand. “It was fun going from department to department and figuring out how that package would actually come to life through production,” she said. It wasn’t just graphic design, but also structural design, prepress—even accounting and budgeting. “That was a very nice hands-on experience because I was so used to just designing for packaging. I never really got to see the whole process and all the things that go into conceptualizing a package for a purpose.”

Bringing design to reality.

Audrey has also participated in the Phoenix Challenge, first as a “shadow” then as a co-lead. “It lets you look more closely at one specific printing method, which is flexography,” she said, “and also it gives you hands-on experience working with a client for the first time. And that has been a very fun process.”

Audrey and her Phoenix Challenge team.

Audrey graduates next year, and has started thinking about her post-grad life and career. Not surprisingly, she’s looking at packaging, or possibly “offshoots of packaging, and get my feet wet in some other things,” she said. “But I currently have my mind set on doing something packaging-wise, whether that’s design, structural design, environmental design, that type of stuff.” And since she had hit it off with her manager at Premier Press, returning as an employee could be an option. She is also looking at other internship opportunities this year.

One of the big issues she sees the industry having to deal with is sustainability. “You have to think about the substrate that you’re working with and try to think of ways we can make something completely, let’s say, fiber-based and try to avoid some of those polymers that are not really recyclable or don’t really biodegrade,” she said.

“I think being able to really think deeply and think with a team on problem-solving is going to be very, very helpful in the future,” she added.

We wish Audrey the best of the success as she heads into her senior year and out into the print industry.

Are you an educator with a 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.