IYA opens doors to new building


Iovine and Young Hall opened to students in August 2019. The new building will be used in addition to the Iovine and Young Academy “Garage” on the fourth floor of TCC, giving students more space and resources.
(Aamani Ponnekanti | Daily Trojan)

When the Iovine and Young Academy opened in 2013, all classes took place in “the Garage,” a collaborative work space on the fourth floor of the Tutor Campus Center. But now, IYA students have a place to officially call home.

The Iovine and Young Hall opened in August after two years of construction — and the space is more than just a collection of classrooms. IYA Assistant Dean for Academic Strategy Matthew Manos said he sees the new building as “a partner in allowing us to realize our curriculum.”

Iovine and Young Hall, or IYH, comprises three floors. The bottom floor is made up of workspaces, the second floor is home to undergraduate classrooms, meeting rooms and conference rooms and the third floor is dedicated to the graduate program’s classrooms. Also on the second floor is a door that opens up to a furnished balcony.

“We have a really beautiful patio space that faces the natural history museum,” Manos said. “Students can work outside, which is really great for creativity.”

While the building contains traditional classrooms, it also features room for students to work on projects and in groups. Students in IYA study Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation, a unique major that combines multiple disciplines.

“We have, definitely, classrooms, but there’s a few different types of classrooms,” Manos said. “There’s ones that are more lecture-style, there’s ones that are more studio-style where you can kind of make a mess and it’s OK, and then we have a really large makerspace that has all kinds of really cool technology for fabricating or prototyping different ideas that people might have.”

Because IYA’s curriculum is hands-on, with an emphasis on collaboration, another key offering of the new building is its meeting rooms.

“We have different meeting spaces that the students can use, such as conference rooms and then what we call huddle rooms, which are sort of smaller meeting spaces,” Manos said.

Each room features a glass door that doubles as a dry erase board on which students sketch diagrams, scrawl out ideas and stick Post-It notes. 

IYA student Abigail Africa, a junior in the Academy, said the individual rooms, in contrast to the open space concept of the Garage, provide the opportunity to meet and work in groups more easily.

“Before, it was super disruptive if you wanted to have someone over while other groups were working,” Africa said. “Nobody was able to concentrate.”

Now, things are different.

“You can have visitors to a space without disturbing people who are working,” she said. “We have room to spread out. We have all these meeting rooms that you can book.”

Casey Reich, a sophomore in IYA, said the more spacious classrooms made the Academy feel more structured.

“It was a little hard to sometimes see everything and feel like you could create things in a space that was so cramped and had a lot of limited resources,” Reich said. “And also just having classrooms with little rolly desks, you have to fit like 30 people in a classroom that is only supposed to accommodate like 15 -— it gets a little hard to pay attention sometimes.”

With the new lecture halls, Reich said he finds it easier to stay organized and focused during class.

With the growth of IYA came the need for a building of its own, Manos said. IYA graduated its first cohort of students in 2018 and continues to admit 25 to 30 undergraduate students each year. The school also offers four minors, including product design, multimedia for designers and entrepreneurs, disruptive innovation and designing for experiences, as well as an online master’s program.

“We originally started just with one cohort of undergrads, and then as time went on, we’re now onto our sixth cohort,” Manos said. “It really grew, [and] we really needed a home for all of these people to be able to collaborate and make really amazing things together.”

With its 10,000 square feet of makerspaces, Iovine and Young Hall offers just that. The building also boasts student resources, including 3D printing and fabrication and media labs. And the academy’s resources extend beyond its students’ tenure there — among the first-floor makerspaces is the Alumni Lab, which Manos described as “a big modular room” with workstations that IYA alumni can apply to use for startups and projects. 

Reich said that recently, IYA students have been able to coordinate with the faculty to get equipment for the makerspaces that will allow them to complete projects with fewer hiccups.

“We’ve got a lot of materials that the students have requested,” Reich said. “We wanted a lathe, so [the dean] got a lathe … I’ve been able to get epoxy. And now we have really nice sewing machines and stuff — like, that is important, and we hadn’t had that before. So, that’s where I really see the big difference.”

But according to Africa, it’s not just the improved technology and meeting space that makes Iovine and Young Hall valuable to the school’s students. The building now gives students a place at the University to call their own.

“More than anything, it gives us a sense of belonging on campus,” Africa said.