Ashley Rose, NYSID’s Director of Continuing and Professional Studies, on how the ICPS can help you take your interior design career to the next level

Courses start on or soon after June 1
Use the code ICPS10 and save 10%  

Summer is a great time to take stock of where you want to be in five years and invest in your professional development. Ashley Rose ’10 (BFA), who directs NYSID’s Institute for Continuing and Professional Studies, has implemented a selection of courses to meet the needs of designers at every level of experience, from total beginners, to people in other fields who want to know whether interior design might be the right fit for their second career, to established design professionals seeking to up-skill, to design entrepreneurs who want to learn essential business practices for start-ups. 

Rose, an alumni of NYSID, worked as an interior designer, and on the merchandising side of design at brands like 1stdibs and Ruby Lane, before taking the helm of NYSID’s ICPS in 2019.  She started her higher education as an undergraduate at SUNY Purchase, but felt unfocused in her studies there, and decided to use the summer after her sophomore year to take what has become the ICPS’s most popular course, Introduction to Interior Design (offered both on-site and online this summer). She loved the six-week immersion into the foundations of interior design so much that she transferred to NYSID and got her BFA there. “This course changed my life,” she says, “So many of our ICPS courses unlock potential and change lives.”  Rose provides an overview of how to navigate ICPS’s many offerings here. 

NYSID: What sets NYSID’s continuing and professional studies courses apart from academic classes at NYSID and other programs?

Ashley Rose: A strength of NYSID’s ICPS courses is that they are taught by instructors who also teach in the degree programs at one of the most respected interior design schools in the country, which means you will be learning from practicing designers and architects at the top of their game. But this is where the similarity between academic classes and ICPS courses ends. Courses in the ICPS are short and efficient professional development strategies to help designers and aspiring designers learn skills, find resources, and/or explore new directions. 

Almost all of the courses we offer at the ICPS are eligible for Continuing Education Credits. To be specific, the majority of our courses are approved by the AIA for LUs and the IDCEC for CEUs. This means if you are a designer licensed by ASID, IIDA, IDC, or an architect licensed by AIA, these courses will help you meet the standards to maintain your license. 

NYSID: Will you give an overview of the kinds of courses you offer and whom they are intended for?  

Ashley Rose: Sure! We have four major categories of courses. 

1. The Business of Design - These courses are intended for the owners of boutique firms or design entrepreneurs who are striking it out on their own. The most talented designer in the world will fail as a firm owner without an understanding of the fundamentals of business. This suite of classes focuses on business skills as they apply to the design industry. Claudia Tejeda’s six-week Business Side of Interior Design course is very popular. Tejeda is an award-winning Domincan born designer, a NYSID alumna who cares deeply about the College,  and the owner of the firm Claudia Giselle Design. She takes students through what transpires from the moment a project commences until the finished work is photographed. I also strongly suggest her Billing for Interior Design Services course. Too many interior designers treat getting paid as an afterthought, when it’s the foundation of a business. 

2. Design Technology - These courses appeal to designers at every stage of their careers. Matriculated NYSID students learn to draft in AutoCAD and apply many types of programs in their studios, but most don’t do a deep dive into programs like InDesign, the document creation software used by most designers, or Revit, a program most firms are using for immersive 3D modeling and visualization of space. Expertise in these programs can make you extremely marketable when you are searching for jobs. Sometimes students matriculated at NYSID degree programs take these 7-week technology courses in the ICPS as an extra to bolster their skills before they go into the job market. More often, seasoned designers take these courses to up-skill, and enhance their resumes and presentations to clients. We offer up to three levels of technology courses for some of these programs, as well as a fundamentals level, so you can start as a total beginner and build your capabilities until you are truly an expert.  

3. Design Resources - the resources courses teach designers how to find the objects and craftspeople who can make their clients’ dreams a reality. This flight of courses includes Judy Sheridan’s popular guided showroom tours, such as the Guided Tour of The New York Design Center and the Guided Tour of the D&D Building, which she uses to explain how to properly source for a budget and how to manage a trade account. 

4. Design Essentials - This category includes classes like Sketching Techniques for Designers, Introduction to Lighting Design, Bathroom Design, and much more. These courses are useful for people new to design, including career changers who want to learn the foundations of design. 
   

NYSID: Are you offering any courses this summer that you’re personally interested in, or that just sound fun?  

There’s a three-session workshop in Creating a Textiles Scheme for a room that  intrigues me. It’s all about mixing patterns, textures and colors to create a rich interior environment and it will be a pleasure for people who love textiles. We’re also offering a three-course Certificate Program in Applied Color for Designers. These are very hands-on courses that teach you to mix and apply paint colors as well as devise the color scheme for a room, and the certificate is a great thing to put on your resume.  

Explore the full catalog of ICPS courses here. Now through June 1, NYSID is offering a 10% discount on ICPS courses with the code ICPS10.  

Questions? Shoot us an email at icps@nysid.edu.