Carrie Finfrock’s Summer Surprise

It’s summer 2020, and thanks to a pandemic a lot of things are not running quite as planned. So if you’re a high school student still wanting to make the most of your summer, what do you do? Well if you’re Carrie Finfrock, you ignore the hurdles and find a new way to keep running towards your goal of strengthening your interior design portfolio for college admission. Her new way? Taking NYSID’s two Summer Pre-College courses, which brought 20 days of top NYC interior design education right to her home in Ohio.

Carrie discovered NYSID Summer Pre-College while reviewing the College’s admissions application requirements on NYSID.edu. She already knew about NYSID’s great reputation as a college but was not aware of the summer offering for high school students. With the local university program she had planned to take being canceled, she got permission from her parents and time off from work to enroll in NYSID’s Summer Pre-College I, which focused on the basics of residential interior design, drafting skills, understanding floor plans and developing a design concept and color scheme. All that work would culminate in the design of a New York City apartment at the end of the 10-day class.

When asked what she had hoped to get from the experience, Carrie responded “To be honest, I went into it with relatively low, but optimistic, expectations. The virtual high school experience that I had been having since March was nowhere near what on-site learning was, so I didn’t know how good a virtual experience could be. Immediately from the first day, I just LOVED it. It completely exceeded my expectations.” In fact, Carrie loved Pre-College I so much that she signed up for Pre-College II to continue the experience and learn more about interior design opportunities related to designing public and professional spaces.

Carrie’s mother Teri was equally impressed with the NYSID program’s delivery and ability to bring students into the professional worlds of the guest speakers. “Carrie was just so excited about all this new information she was learning. She’d run upstairs during breaks to tell us some new thing she learned. It clearly opened all of our eyes to a whole range of professional options within the interior design world. I was also very impressed that Dean Ellen Fisher participated in the final project critique. She had such honest and good constructive criticism for each student to work from.”

What impressed Carrie the most about NYSID’s Summer Pre-College? “The professors! They were so smart, enthusiastic, and encouraging. They showed me how to build upon and bring my ideas to life. I am still amazed about the amount of information I learned in a four-week period. I have never had another class in school that taught me so much in such a short period of time. And the professors so clearly love what they do–both as interior designers and as teachers. Professor Pam was so passionate in the way she explained an idea she had for a bathroom that I felt like, I want to do that–I want to have a design career that excites me that much.”