Featured Student: Atara Zmora
Major (College): Industrial Design (DAAP)
Advice to Current UHP Students: “Do at least ONE honors seminar; the topics are always interesting and not doing more of them is one of my biggest regrets. Also: whatever you decide to do for an experience, have fun while you're doing it!”
Graduation Year: 2026
Experiences:
- Borrowing the Earth from Our Children honors seminar
- Study abroad in Spain
- German language and culture (self-designed)
- Full-semester study abroad in Germany
I was thrust outside my comfort zone and forced to be independent to a level I hadn't been before.
Atara Zmora UHP Graduate, 2026
Atara's UHP Journey
Atara Zmora began her UHP journey with a short-term study-abroad experience in Spain and a self-designed experience centered on teaching herself to speak German—steps that, when combined with an honors seminar on sustainability that sparked her interest in Germany’s environmental policies, paved the way for a full semester in Wuppertal, Germany, in the spring of 2025.
Zmora, an Industrial Design major, continued to study design while abroad, further developing her skills while she began to explore how research and design intersect as she practiced collaborating in this utterly new cultural context. “It made me braver and more willing to take the opportunities offered to me by this school, the design industry, and other places,” she says.
Zmora attributes her wide-ranging learning over her five years at UC largely to the UHP, which pushed her to discover “a LOT about different subjects that could be connected with my major… As a matter of fact, it's gotten to the point that I've fallen in love with research and might even go to graduate school for an entirely different subject and tie it back to design.”