BDIC Student David Farren describes how the close connections made through AES’s classes helped him build his future career goal of creating his own nonprofit fashion organization.
The Arts Extension Service (AES) and the Bachelor's Degree with Individual Concentration (BDIC) program have had a long-standing connection built by their shared students who are dedicated to the arts, individualization, and contributing to their community. David Farren, a recent 2024 BDIC graduate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, describes how the Arts Extension Service allowed him to push his self-designed degree in the direction he saw fit for his future self.
“AES worked incredibly well with my BDIC fashion curriculum,” says David Farren. Farren’s BDIC concentration is in Fashion Studies where he aspires to open his own nonprofit clothing organization, a dream he discovered through his coursework with AES. “AES taught me a lot about nonprofit organizations, which is something I thought I’d never be interested in before, but I was clearly wrong,” says Farren. Farren completed Introduction to Arts Management, Arts Fundraising, Arts Marketing, Financial Management in the Arts, Arts Programming and Foundations in Arts Entrepreneurship in order to receive the Arts Management Campus Certificate. “The classes were able to give me great insight on how to not only build my brand, but also my general understanding of real world structures,” stated Farren.
AES provided Farren with close connections and direct communication with professors, which are important learning features that are hard to find in a university with more than 30,000 students. “The professors were extremely caring towards their students,” says Farren, “and I believe that is what made the classes so productive.”
The intimacy of the classroom setting allows students to interact and engage with each other, the course work, and the instructors on a deeper level than classes that hold hundreds of students in a lecture hall setting. “The true passion encompassed in the small classroom environment inspired genuine interest in my education,” says Farren. David Farren feels that his experience was “transformative” in many ways, but especially towards his future career aspirations.
Now, David is using his marketing and management skills built through AES to build his own fashion brand. “As for my future endeavors, I hope to open my own nonprofit organization,” says Farren. He plans to donate the proceeds of his future business to those who struggle with mental illness. “I always envisioned a world where I can help people while also chasing my own dreams,” he says. Currently, Farren works for the Business Improvement District of Amherst where he is able to translate a lot of the knowledge he has learned in the classroom to his career. Through AES, he has studied the foundations of nonprofit organizations to make this dream a reality. “Today, I continue to build my own clothing brand, DIFfusion, and keep striving for greatness.”