Know any clever kids with big dreams of growing up to be the next Frank Gehry or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe? If they’re students at a public high school in the L.A. Unified School District, their shot at making that dream come true might just have gotten a little closer. The Southern California Institute of Architecture has announced a special scholarship program that will fully fund all five years of tuition for some promising local students.
The application process opened yesterday for the first class of scholarship recipients—students who will be starting their undergrad education in the autumn of 2017—and will be taken through January 15, 2017. If accepted, the only requirement is that the student stay in the top 10 percent of their class through graduation.
“SCI-Arc is embedded in the fabric of Los Angeles. With this scholarship we are reaffirming our relationship to the city’s public education system,” the school’s director, Hernan Diaz Alonso, stated in a press release.
The Arts District-based SCI-Arc is a small institution, but the faculty and alums have accumulated pretty much every prestigious award in architecture, and the undergraduate program was recently ranked second in the country by DesignIntelligence. In addition to this scholarship for locals, they also opened up four new scholarships in their graduate programs, one each for specialists in design theory, the design of cities, architectural technology and architectural practice in fiction and entertainment.
Hopefully, the program will encourage more bright local students to stay in L.A. for school and pursue architecture and design, using their creative new ideas to build more gorgeous buildings and public spaces for all of us to enjoy.
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