Iovine Young Academy Piece (From 2020)
Here's a piece I wrote a couple of years ago, which never saw the light of day
I researched and wrote this piece back in 2020, but it didn’t end being published. I won’t go into why that happened, but I’m pleased to be able to get it out there now, to celebrate receiving my physical copy of Troy Carter’s Venice Magazine, which I worked on!
Founded in 2013, with its first set of freshmen walking through its doors in autumn 2014, the USC Iovine Young Academy (Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation) has cultivated a unique, entrepreneurial spirit among its students. It’s multidisciplinary four-year program aims to equip students with an array of foundational skills and, more importantly, an instinctive level of intersectional thinking. In today’s rapidly evolving music and tech landscape the Academy’s focus on creating individuals who are able to navigate and disrupt the zeitgeist, while formulating their own status quo, presents the industry with young people who can take on anything that comes their way. In direct contrast to the often linear ways in which college programs teach their students, the Academy is spearheading its own alternative methodology, which has already seen several successes graduate from its halls.
“The Academy was founded on the idea that the 21stcentury creative will need to be adept at cross-disciplinary modes of thinking and working, at understanding the unique opportunities for innovation that exist where disciplines intersect; and at navigating complex ecosystems that cross creativity, technology, business and digital communication.”’ said former Dean Erica Muhl, who was also one of the founding executive directors. Alongside the founders, Andre Young (Dr. Dre) and Jimmy Iovine, she has injected their combined passion for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in music and tech into the Academy’s ethos. Graduate Jamie Haberman went straight into a role at Q&A, the startup co-founded by Troy Carter and Suzy Ryoo, after her time at the Academy. She is a Product Designer at the company, which is working behind-the-scenes to cultivate a progressive, dynamic approach to artist marketing and other facets of the music industry. “I felt like we were always learning by doing rather than sitting and being lectured to,” she explained. “And I felt like I got to touch all of the different areas that I was interested in.”
Jamie’s experience encouraged her to join the dots between her seemingly disparate interests; music, art and technology. At the Academy she found a small community of like minded ‘misfits’ (a term that the Academy itself proudly uses) who all had similarly divergent needs. “It felt like, finally, I was in a space where I was with so many like minded people. And I was able to click and connect with everyone at such a deep level so easily,” she said. “I know I can always hit any of these people up in the future, if I ever start my own thing.”
This is also reflected in their staff roster, which Muhl said the faculty has dubbed ‘Misfit Island’, “because none of them seemed to fit in where they used to be.”
“They’re all multi-disciplinary thinkers who didn’t feel the need to silo their creativity, or their teaching, into any specific department or major,” she explained. “The Academy looks at learning very differently, and embraces new forms of contextual, experiential and applied learning, and so teaching here actually requires a certain amount of creativity in developing each learning experience, and also allows for experimentation and new ideas. That’s kind of a rare commodity in higher education.”
Muhl also highlighted the Academy’s cohort model, which encourages peer-to-peer learning, which she says has, “has de-siloed traditional academic disciplines to easily allow for new, hybrid disciplinary knowledge”.
“(There’s) a focus on developing adaptability, critical discernment, and a passion for lifelong learning that allows for continual renewal or augmentation of knowledge, and repurposing of knowledge and skills as may be dictated by changes in technology, society, or the life-work landscape,” she added.
This is exemplified by Jamie’s experience. “One day, I could be coding and the next day, I could be building an art installation. And then the next day, I'm in an accounting class. [It really] stretched my brain to think about all of these different aspects,” she said. “Especially in our capstone. In our senior year, we had to work on a year-long project. I was able to see how all of these disparate fields and skills could come together in a company or an entrepreneurial practice.”
Students find their own path through the program’s broad, integrated offering, and music doesn’t dominate or dictate the curriculum. Rather, those who are taking part in the program might gravitate towards music, which they’re given the freedom to explore in greater depth while utilising the disciplines they acquire along the way. For instance, towards the end of their time with the Academy students embark on a capstone project, whereby they take on a long-term endeavour seeing it through from start to finish. This is where those with a passion for music could really take a deep dive. Jamie and her roommate at the time created an aromatherapy diffuser that was part app, part robot. They were both into wellness and used the project to immerse themselves in that world. The diffuser would learn what the owner’s needs were and create bespoke blends of essential oils to complement their moods and emotions.
Suzy Ryoo, co-founder at Q&A, where Jamie is now an employee, has appeared as a speaker at the USC Iovine Young Academy and hired several of its graduates as interns and full-time staff. “One of our interns, Asia Clarkson, who's now an associate at Spotify. She's someone who thinks and dreams in playlists,” she said. “Her senior capstone project was about the emotion behind algorithms and how they show [up] in playlists.”
She continued, “When you have that kind of intensity and depth, and thoughtfulness, beyond multidisciplinary coursework and curriculum, with work experience and exposure to industry, and a setting that demands thinking about a future and innovation, then you create a really nice flywheel.”
Essentially, the program is creating young visionaries, with the skillsets to manage multi-faceted projects alone, or collaboratively. They’re able to look at tasks from numerous angles and approach them with a far less rigid view than their peers from other colleges. 2018 alumni Arjun Mehta is a great example of the Academy’s success in giving its students a solid foundation from which to create and explore new ideas with confidence, and an entrepreneurial spirit. His startup Moment House has made headlines this year thanks to its impressive lineup of investors, and the artists who signed up for its launch; Kygo, Yungblud, Kaytranada and Denzel Curry among them. The livestreaming platform is centred on delivering a high quality user experience rooted in emotion, “We’re always working backwards from the fans – if we can make them feel like they’re in a private, ephemeral, exclusive section of the internet with my artist in this beautiful moment, then we’ve succeeded,” he told Music Ally in October 2020.
Similar to Mehta, Jamie’s roommate, Suraya Shivji started her own company called HAGS. It’s an app that’s centred on high school students, allowing them to create virtual yearbooks and comment on each other’s pictures - a direct response to the impact of Covid-19 on real-world high school attendance. HAGS received $1million funding from Google’s venture arm GV as well as BoxGroup and a handful of angel investors. Another alumni-conceived project is Y Combinator-backed startup, Wren. Launched by Ben Stanfield, Landon Brand and Mimi Tran Zambetti, Wren is a web app that utilises a subscription service to enable users to offset their carbon footprint, with the aim of neutralising it altogether. Another alumni from the class of 2018 is Brianna Doyle, who is now managing teams at Google’s Creative Lab.
“I’d say the most common career paths coming out of the academy would be either starting your own company, joining an early stage startup (mostly tech-related) or working at one of the big name tech companies,” Jamie said.
One of the key investors in Mehta’s startup was Troy Carter, who, like Suzy, his business partner at Q&A, and now Venice Music, has also spoken at the Iovine Young Academy on several occasions. His track record for innovation and almost clairvoyant investment within music and tech, as well as his achievements as a manager, make him an ideal candidate to impart knowledge to the program’s students. Troy cites ‘non-traditional thinking’ as one of the core themes of his talks at the school, reinforcing a critical aspect of its program.
“When Jimmy and Dr. Dre founded the school, just [thinking about] their entire philosophy around these cross disciplines between music, technology, and creative thought, I knew it was going to be special,” he said. “And because it’s small, you're able to curate the amount of students that come in and then invest a lot of resources into those students.”
The Academy offers industry experience through a program called CurriculumPlus, which offers student teams the opportunity to work as strategists on real-world problems through collaborations with industry partners. This includes brands such as Adidas, Audi/Volkswagen, Verizon, Mattel, and Fender Guitars, as well as non-profits such as the Grammy Foundation, the American Heart Association, and Heal the Bay. Such varied and high-level industry connections means the students who make it onto the program get access to opportunities that could lead to full-time employment as it did with Jamie and her coursemate Jet Kwok, who also works at Q&A.
With all of the core elements of the syllabus working in conjunction to fuel the free-flowing, unrestricted nature of the program, it’s clear to see why it has attained such a glowing reputation. Ever the visionary, Troy sees the Academy becoming a powerhouse within the educational sphere on a par with MIT. “From a future standpoint I envision the Iovine Young Academy being the MIT for music,” he stated. “So when you see the people who have come out of MIT over the years and their contribution to the world, in solving different types of problems, I think this program has the potential to do that within the creative spaces.”