The CAPX offices, showing a large wall made up of text detailing different careers in art and design.

Real World Experience

Get Off Campus

As an emerging artist or designer, it’s important for you to examine your creative practice where it lives and breathes—in the world outside of the classroom. At SAIC, we want you to explore and experience the communities that surround us and the world beyond, so you’ll have required off-campus credits. Study abroad programs, internships and residencies, and off-campus research opportunities are just some of the ways you can fulfill them.

Experience in the Professional World

Professional experience is a fundamental part of the SAIC curriculum. Through the School’s extensive internship program you’ll find hundreds of opportunities to choose from, including stints at galleries, design firms, tech startups, and community organizations. A network of career advisors, faculty, and student peers work with you and your employer, so you’ll get personalized coaching and support along the way.

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Internships

Professional experience is a fundamental part of the SAIC curriculum. Through the School’s extensive internship program you’ll find hundreds of opportunities to choose from, including stints at galleries, design firms, tech startups, and community organizations. A network of career advisors, faculty, and student peers work with you and your employer, so you’ll get personalized coaching and support along the way.

Exhibition Experience

At SAIC’s student-run SITE Galleries, you can be a curator or archivist, work in gallery administration, prepare and install shows, or prepare and show your own work for the viewing public. SITE is a downtown Chicago storefront space—a place where campus and city merge.  

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Four full bookshelves on the wall of a gallery.


 

“SITE is a really great place to get an introduction to a professional gallery space.”
- Matthew Cortez (BA 2025) Install Gallery Assistant at SITE Galleries
 

Off-Campus Study

Leaving your comfort zone can change your perspective, spark new ideas, charge your imagination, and give you the confidence to live and work anywhere. Whether you venture out on faculty-led study trips or immerse yourself in a semester- or year-long study abroad program, you'll grow as a thinker, maker, and global citizen.

Off-campus Study

Special Opportunities

Each year, new and unusual opportunities come up for students who want to collaborate on outside projects. Many of these opportunities are international. Take a look at a few from recent years.

A student in braids of green, black, and blue, with a raised fist

SAIC at the Venice Architecture Biennale

The US Department of State selected SAIC, along with the University of Chicago, to commission the US Pavilion’s Dimensions of Citizenship at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. SAIC students traveled to Venice to show their own work offsite that envisioned expanded definitions of citizenship in the world today.

A Professional Design Challenge

A Professional Design Challenge

A partnership between SAIC, Kikkerland Design, and local production house Paper Source challenged students to design innovative products that add joy to people’s lives. Designers toured the production facilities, met with merchandising officers and Kikkerlands’s design director, and experienced the full professional process, from research and concept development to prototyping. The work was on public view at WantedDesign during NYC x Design Week.

A colorful vector illustration depicting a chateau

Reimagining a French Chateau

On its 500th anniversary, France’s iconic Chateau de Chambord was still an unfinished work— so the Estate of Chamord invited SAIC, among a select group of schools worldwide, to envision the Renaissance castle’s completed state. After conducting historical research, SAIC students collaborated to imagine a future Chambord that referenced its past, producing a series of 20 digital images and a short video, and finally attending the opening of the project exhibition.

A Food For Future promo featuring a black and white image of the Bean

Italian Design Day

SAIC students from a variety of disciplines were among a select group invited to participate in Italian Design Day 2020, an international initiative fostering cultural ties between Italy and the rest of the world. The theme: “Drawing the Future. Development, Innovation, Sustainability, Beauty.” Their work imagined solutions for a new synergy between people and the instruments we use for food.