“My name is Henry Chang and I am a graduate student in Transportation Design. I graduated from the undergrad program at CCS a while ago and I had my own career. I’ve always wanted to come back and get a master’s degree but CCS didn’t offer one until this year. I happened to find out that CCS started a master’s program and it fit my needs, so that’s why I chose CCS.
I’m from San Francisco, California and since I’ve graduated from CCS I went to different places as a contractor doing alias work and also design work for a design firm as well as auto studios. I’ve done my own projects and did a little bit of work for a movie, I did a lot of stuff before I came here. Design and Alias work was my specialty.
Like everybody else, I’m looking long term and I’m looking for work. Eventually I’d like to go into teaching as well and as far as I understand it, if you want to go into teaching, you need a master’s degree. That’s one of the things I’m looking into for the long term.
When I was here the first time around, I always felt that CCS was very strong in technical issues. The College is well known for people who do good renderings and they’re well known throughout the United States for their Visual Communication (VisCom) skills. That’s the reason I came here. I was looking for the same kind of stuff. I know that CCS specializes in transportation and they’re still one of the top schools in the world for teaching VisCom and technical issues with cars.
On top of that I was looking more for other things, where as an undergrad you do more technical stuff but I know as a master’s student you are going to do more of the human related issues, such as being a manager and you’re able to develop products. Those things, for this stage in my career, were the things I was looking for. I was very familiar with the faculty and they’re very hands-on, which is one of the big reasons I chose to come back here.
Right now we are working on a GM project. It’s called designing the next electric vehicle (EV). We are looking into the EV market as a whole. The EV market is very new so we don’t have one yet but we are going to look into the Hybrid market as a template and try to figure out how to grow the EV market. Right now the Hybrid market, in itself, is very small. In the future we are guessing that the EV and Hybrid are going to be more mainstream. We think more people are going to drive those cars. In order for us to prepare for that, we need to design the next generation of cars to meet those needs.
I was out of school for a long time and I came back to school so for me it’s a more personal challenge to get used to school life again. Thankfully I’ve been very fortunate that the program is new so the staff is very accommodating and they try their best to make sure their students succeed no matter where they came from so it worked out perfect for me. They are there to help me succeed and it’s really been great. I think the master’s program at CCS is exciting, it challenges you and at the same time it’s been great.”
MFA Student (Transportation Design) | Henry Chang
