Matthew Lee

Matthew Lee
University of Illinois, Urbana-Chapaign
Sphomore
Vernon Hill, IL

My name is Matthew Lee, and I am a sophomore at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I’m currently pursuing a major in Graphic Design and a minor in business. When I was in 7th grade, I had the opportunity to volunteer at a nursing home. During my time there, I noticed the difficulty some people had completing certain tasks. Tasks that the world considers mundane, but to some of the elderly folk in the nursing home were incredibly challenging. Witnessing this, I noticed myself start to ask myself how certain things could be changed to make their lives easier. To improve not only the residents of the home’s lives, but the nurses and caretakers’ lives as well. This desire to help people combined with my love for art, allowing me to take my first steps in design.

Along this journey, I had the honor of being recognized at both the state and national level art contests. Additionally I have the privilege of working as an undergraduate teaching assistant for a statistics course offered at UIUC. This opportunity provided me with the opportunity to integrate design with teaching while creating models and visualizations in a digestible format. While helping the students, I noticed that traditional teaching styles could only go so far. Seeing some students struggling to grasp certain concepts, I had to learn to adapt to their needs and their unique circumstances, creating graphs, visualizations, and explanations that made complex ideas into digestible information. While I never expected it from a statistics course, I learned truly how widespread and connected my goal truly was.

Through all of my life experiences, my passion for creation has only grown. While I was initially only interested in the world of design, my draw towards entrepreneurship has led me to pursue a minor in business as mentioned above. I aspire to combine design and business, harmonize imagination with practicality, and convert vision into action. I want to introduce a side of design that maybe the world has never seen and exemplify what design is truly meant to do. There are so many different paths to explore, and this scholarship will be a great opportunity for me to grow and learn. I want to sincerely thank SNUAA for selecting me as a scholar for the SNUAA Undergraduate Scholarship this year.