Our Story

Our Job Is To Help Students Find Jobs.
Teaching is a relatively easy job if you don’t care much. It is the most difficult job in the world if you do care.  It takes commitment from both sides to ensure every student not only has opportunities for success but more importantly, knowing what to do when given these opportunities. Educational institutions have not changed much in the last hundred years. 

What is higher education for?
This was the central question relating to how we might get deeply involved with students and their lives. We decided to augment what schools are not preparing and providing for our students…especially those students who have demonstrated or expressed creativity.

In 2016, an idea was born based on an uneven pathway toward careers. How are students finding jobs? Who is helping them launch their careers? How can faculty work directly with students and help them find jobs? Why is helping students find jobs so important? The belief is that if we make an impact on a student, that student will make an impact on themselves, their families, and ultimately their communities.

In what ways can faculty sincerely care about students? Those students interested in their career planning were welcomed into VISCOM. The main focus of VISCOM was to bridge the skills gap and the networking gap by helping students recognize their skills/knowledge and broadening their understanding of career opportunities.

All by providing students in the communication design area with outside-of-the-classroom experiences directly related to their career aspirations. VISCOM, under the guidance of two main faculty members, entrusted students to manage and operate the center. This means every aspect of VISCOM reflected how typical creative agencies would operate, from acquiring and cultivating clients to working independently or within teams, as well as handling budgets, proposals, and the hiring process. VISCOM was a tremendous success, operating for over a decade from its 2007 launch through 2019. Success directly plays a role in helping students launch their careers. The success of students is not only measured in finding jobs, but that was VISCOM’s main focus. Since 2007, VISCOM alumni have gone into various creative industries to make a huge impact, and they continue to do so. The success VISCOM was having, both on and off campus, gained advocates and supporters from across all communities. 

Creativity Adapts
We quickly learned that the need ran much deeper and wider than just for creatives, particularly graphic designers. Based on the success of VISCOM, we learned that we needed a broader reach in order to include additional students from multiple disciplines. In 2019, VISCOM transitioned into what we now call IntersectLA or IXLA. The world is changing. Technologies bring new opportunities. Students’ needs are evolving. Creativity adapts. IntersectLA was born from these truths. We wanted to be more diverse. Diverse in engaging with students, diverse in the work we want to do, and diverse in the industries our students would enter. IntsersectLA is the intersection of all of these. 

We knew the model could be replicated and shared. We purposely shared the models with many higher education institutions, including the University of Agder in Norway, College of the Canyons, Otis College of Art and Design, CSU Fullerton, and Chapman University. We wanted to create a community of students and faculty who share their work and work together to help students launch their careers. We wanted to be at the intersection.  We are now seeing positive early outcomes. Several institutions have learned the model and are in the process of incorporating it into their respective environments. College of the Canyons recently launched its version of IXLA. Other institutions have learned about IXLA and have created their own versions. 

It will be a natural fit for California State University campuses to integrate each campus’s version of IXLA. We are always willing to share our model and success stories.