Graduate student Kaitlyn Hochart hardly expected a morning Instagram scroll to change her life. But as she passed time before her dentist's appointment, a post about the Iovine and Young Academy sparked her attention.

"There were two words that caught my eyes: master's degree and creativity, and I quickly swiped back," Hochart recalls. "I'm like, wait, what is this? And within ten minutes, I had quickly gone through the whole website."

If that’s an unusual way to discover a graduate program, well, Hochart is an unusual Academy student. A former Navy nurse, she had no background in design, business or technology prior to attending the Academy. But as a labor and delivery nurse and yoga instructor, Hochart has years of experience in an equally critical element of human-centered design: helping humans.

"It's that empathetic connection and being able to advocate for people and listen to them, especially for individuals whose voices will often get lost in the system," Hochart says. "A magical realization of how powerful it is to hold space for other individuals."

That focus has already served her well in the program. Though she admits to an adjustment period to the Academy’s team-focused approach — neither yoga instruction nor nursing offered Hochart many opportunities to be part of a collaborative working group — she's enjoyed the chance to explore what roles suit her best.

At first, Hochart slipped into a support position on her team-based Academy projects. "I played soccer growing up, and I would always love being the person who did the assist versus scoring the goal," Hochart explains. Her ability to hold space for others, built over her nursing career and refined in her time teaching yoga, made her an excellent nonjudgmental listener and supporter.

But recently, Hochart stepped into leadership and one project in particular has benefited from her unique expertise. Peace Pods are individual spaces that give counseling clients a calm, healing space to regulate and steady themselves before appointments so their counseling time can be as effective as possible. The pods are intended for clients in underserved communities, particularly women recovering from trauma and PTSD. Because the project is a partnership between the Academy, the USC School for Dramatic Arts and Open Path Counseling Center, Hochart led a team of undergraduate set designers to design and prototype these spaces.

Hochart's medical background immediately gave her an in-depth understanding of the project's needs and goals. After years of learning to advocate and holding space for patients, she points out, "Now I can pivot into something different and design a physical safe space. How amazing is it to weave everything together?" And as the Peace Pods project continues to the clinical research stage, Hochart intends to continue work with the Open Path Counseling Center long after the end-of-semester pitch session is complete.

To Hochart, Peace Pods are an excellent example of the innovations she hopes to bring to the field. Though healthcare innovation startups are more common, and many employ subject-matter experts like doctors, Hochart points out that far fewer initiatives consult nurses, despite their on-the-ground perspective. As a healthcare professional with growing proficiency in design, Hochart can't wait to show how valuable that perspective can be.

“As nurses we're so siloed in a profession where we're overlooked a lot and are not treated with a lot of respect and are taken advantage of, and overworked,” she says.  “We have all of these skills, so I can keep up with people in all of these other professions without an issue and bring a totally different skill set that otherwise would have been missing.”

That’s why Hochart has encouraged other nurses, many of whom have reached out over social media, to join her on this path. As she has discovered, the value of her skills far outweighs any experience requirements on an application.

Hochart says, "It's been such an empowering journey to see that you don't have to have a perfectly manicured resume to meet these requirements. And what you do learn in a field that is very specialized can still be so broad and applied across the board."

As a nurse and yoga instructor, graduate student Kaitlyn Hochart is hardly your typical designer, but it gives her a fresh perspective that she’s ready to lend to the startup world...

Kaitlyn Hochart Puts the Humanity into Human-Centered Design