Meet Our Student of the Month: Anna Frias

We are launching a new regular PGSF feature: the Student of the Month. In partnership with WhatTheyThink, we profile a promising student in a graphic communications or related program. The goal is to raise awareness of graphic communications programs, as well as help students get a “leg up” on entering the industry after graduation. This month, we profile Anna Frias, a third-year student in Cal Poly’s Graphic Communication program.

We are inaugurating a new regular PGSF feature: the Student of the Month. In partnership with WhatTheyThink, we profile a promising student in a graphic communications or related program. The goal is to raise awareness of graphic communications programs, as well as help students get a “leg up” on entering the industry after graduation.

This month, we spoke to Anna Frias, a student in her third year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She is majoring in Graphic Communication, concentrating in Design Reproduction Technology. In her nomination letter, Professor and Chair Colleen Twomey wrote, “Anna Frias exemplifies the Learn by Doing philosophy at Cal Poly through her exceptional leadership, creative excellence, and dedication to both academic and professional pursuits. As a Graphic Communication student, Anna has distinguished herself as a dynamic leader who seamlessly bridges technical expertise with strategic communication skills.”

So what attracted Anna to print?

“I really like the tangibility of print,” she said. She was initially attracted to graphic design, but found Graphic Communication a better fit. “It still lets me be creative in the sense of graphic design, but I do more like the technicality of print and the mechanics that go into it. I really love being able to work with the machines and think technically about how I need to set things up so it prints correctly and all those nitty-gritty things that you wouldn’t get with graphic design.”

And thus the concentration in Design Reproduction Technology.

“It’s similar to graphic design, but it’s more, again, that technicality,” she said. “It’s kind of like prepress—I’m learning how to set up design files for prepress, but I still get to be creative in design.” For example, she said, “if a graphic designer sends me their beautiful artwork, it would be my turn to make sure it’s print-ready.”

Anna’s hands-on experience involved serving as General Manager of University Graphic Systems (UGS), Cal Poly’s student-run printing enterprise, where she oversees operations, manages a team, and ensures the delivery of high-quality printing services to the campus community, including business cards, posters, flyers, trifolds, specialty printing, screen printing on shirts, direct-to-film shirts. “We do stickers, we do wide format—anything,” she added.

It’s a position not without its challenges, one of the biggest being one that most university printing departments contend with: yearly turnover.

“Every year, a whole new team of people comes in,” she said. “So the biggest challenge was learning everything, figuring out how we’re going to make it run as smoothly as possible now that all of us are completely new.”

Read the Full Artcle Here