Two graphic design students at Moreno Valley College took home top prizes at the 2024 American Advertising Awards for their projects.
Michelle Reyes Mendoza and Derya Emanet are the two students who won the awards, which recognize excellence in advertising. Derya was awarded a Bronze ADDY and Michelle was awarded a Silver ADDY. Michelle’s win qualifies her to advance to the upcoming regional division of the competition. Both Applied Media and Design students were featured in news stories that aired on NBC (San Diego) and Telemundo (San Diego and San Francisco).
Michelle got to do an interview with Telemundo and couldn’t believe she would get this amount of attention, and was really nervous when it came time to do the interview. “I never expected a person such as myself to come from a small town and receive attention from the news,” said Michelle. “I was feeling a lot of anxiety because I didn’t want to embarrass myself or my family for something that I created.” During the interview with Telemundo, Michelle opened up about turning adversity into inspiration. She encouraged other individuals with disabilities or anyone faced with challenges in life, to never give up and fight for their dreams. “If you have an opportunity to show what you’re made of then go for it,” she said. Derya also gave tips and advice for people to follow their dreams and not give up. “Don’t be too hyper critical of yourself and push yourself out of your comfort zone,” Derya insisted. “Honestly I wasn’t going to enter the competition, but then I went on a whim and I won something.”
Derya’s win unfortunately doesn’t qualify her to advance to the next round, but she is still proud of herself and is hoping to enter again and do better next time. “Getting the bronze award made me feel proud and it motivates me to do better next time because I want to enter again,” she said.
The work involved in creating their submission was pretty challenging because there were so many concepts and ideas that they wanted to incorporate into one piece. “For me it was a pretty difficult process because I wanted to incorporate so many ideas, but over time some things didn’t come out the way I wanted,” Michelle said. Derya added, “We went through many processes of making sketches and getting feedback from our classmates.”
MVC Applied Digital Media Associate Professor, Robert Delgadillo assigned an industry relevant project meant to be an advertisement for an event–and it was perfect for the ADDY Awards. “My role was to give them a prompt and give them the creative freedom for their project as long as it met the learning objective of the assignment,” Professor Delgadillo explained.
Both Derya and Michelle are hard working students and they both hope to keep achieving their goals as their lives move on. If you see either one of them on campus give them a congratulations for the hard work and effort they put into their project.
