At Parsons, learning dissolves the boundaries between classroom, city, and industry. Your education places you in the center of NYC's creative community — a network of makers, strategists, scholars, and entrepreneurs. And your faculty are working professionals challenging you to address real-world needs, including through industry partnerships designed to cultivate marketable skills and a network to support you throughout your career. In this dynamic collaborative environment, you apply Parsons' signature focus on innovation, sustainability, aesthetics, and skilled craft to industry needs across a range of sectors.
Credit-bearing courses challenge you to address a need presented by a sponsor, such as an organization or business. Courses often enable you to collaborate with peers from outside your discipline on in-depth work and let you connect with industry leaders in a sustained way. Courses sometimes involve prizes.
Sustained extracurricular projects are led by a faculty member and pair students with an external partner, such as a community group or a company, to focus on a design or business challenge. Project work can involve cash awards.
Sponsored by organizations or firms, these briefer creative problem-solving engagements can take many forms, including brainstorming sessions, weekend hackathons, or competitions that can result in cash prizes. These intense immersions into a design problem build your collaborative skills with a limited time commitment.
Industry partners seek out the Parsons community for its skill in generating innovative, sustainable, human-centered design solutions. Projects enrich your ability to situate users at the center of the design process and integrate empathic and analytic methods. You develop skill in bringing together ethnographic and systems thinking tools with quantitative analysis to frame key challenges.
A reputation for design excellence, material exploration, and iterative process makes Parsons an ideal place to bring design challenges from a range of industries and sectors. Industry partners outline a need, and you undertake a process of iterative ideation, prototyping, and user testing. Longer engagements allow for the refined prototyping and testing that supports robust concept development.
Designers and design strategists are increasingly sought out for their ability to advance an organization's mission through services, systems and products. Partnered projects offer you a supportive environment in which to explore new use cases, product ideas, and consumer experiences. They also give you opportunities to draft implementation, execution, and marketing plans and present them to real clients.
“Industries are evolving at warp speed, and Parsons students are adept at coming in with new perspectives on changing systems effectively.”
If you’re seeking talent to hire, an innovation-focused collaboration, or a creative engagement to help your organization or company navigate business challenges, Parsons can help.
A national competition challenged students from Parsons and across the university to design and construct a sustainable solar-powered home. The result was Empowerhouse, an award-winning eco-friendly, affordable home developed with Habitat for Humanity D.C.
School of Constructed Environments students in Parsons’ Design Workshop, the school’s signature design-build course, recently partnered with a nonprofit, applying their architectural and construction services to the project of building a new community pavilion and furnishings on Governors Island
Care + Wear, a start-up launched by Lucy Jones, BFA Fashion ’15, partnered with Parsons fashion students to redesign the patient gown. The resulting garment significantly improved functionality, sustainability, and, most importantly, patient experience.
Inspired by the sensing and computational capacity of Intel's Curie module, student teams from Parsons' Industrial Design, Data Visualization, and Design and Technology programs created devices and garments with features that can enhance well-being and social connections.
The New School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.
