Janine Carendi started her flourishing Manhattan-based company, AREA Interior Design, while she was still in the AAS program. Named by Domino magazine as one of the nation’s top ten to watch in 2008, she credits Parsons with making that leap seem more like the natural next step. She had interned with mentors as stylistically diverse as Victoria Hagen and Jonathan Adler, adding definition and unexpected influences to her own work. Access to the New York showrooms and experts, the materials and the factories where tradition and innovation set design standards for the world gave Carendi and her classmates an early initiation into the workings of the industry. And since every class project at Parsons becomes a finished portfolio piece, she was ready.

As she gallops forward professionally, Carendi maintains her connection with Parsons—conferring with trusted teachers when she’s stuck and hiring Parsons students and alumni. “I understand where they’re coming from. I know they will be extremely creative and extremely diligent workers.”