Treston Nguyen Brought World Studios to Oregon State. Here's How.

Treston Nguyen doesn't consider himself an extrovert. Despite that, today he leads a board of executives, runs meetings for dozens of members, and gets asked in interviews to describe what it's like overseeing it all. None of that was true before he decided to bring World Studios to Oregon State.

He got the idea during a visit to Yale, where a friend on World Studios' (then Design for America) Yale board brought him to a meeting. He watched what the group was building for the community around them and wondered: why isn't this at Oregon State?

The friend who brought him told him the answer was simple. Start it himself.

So he did. Treston, a rising junior studying computer science at Oregon State, reached out to World Studios that October, shared what he'd seen at Yale, and asked what it would take to bring a studio to his own campus. He connected with a member of World Studios' staff, Amy Stefanski, who helped walk him through the process and made him feel confident enough to give it a go — although there were some challenges to navigate.

Studios typically launch with the academic school year, lining up with the recruiting and funding cycles built around it. Treston launched in winter, off that calendar, with no incoming class to recruit from and no funding push to draw on. He opened applications through his own network, pulled in people he already knew, and covered many of the costs himself.

His first step was to build an executive board, which he did by posting an open call to LinkedIn and his personal Instagram. "I needed people to know this was going to be hard," he said. Many of his friends applied. A couple of strangers did too, a freshman and a senior he'd never met. After vetting them both with a one-off meeting, he brought them on.

Once his board was established, Treston put out a call for project leads, looking for people with leadership skills and initiative who could run a small team on their own. Two ideas moved forward: a food bank website rebuild, with the team meeting the client every two weeks to understand their needs, and a matching platform connecting students with professors and local companies for project opportunities.

With his board and first projects in place, Treston built out a calendar of regular meetings, a recurring commitment for students to get together and work on their projects. He made a point of adding small, thoughtful touches: candy on Valentine's Day, and during midterms and finals, a meeting with no agenda at all, just space to talk and relax. Students kept coming back knowing they'd get support with their work, and that someone was paying attention to them as people.

Through it all, one of the larger obstacles Treston faced was comparing himself to other studios. "I wanted our studio to be so big," he said. "But I soon realized, when you're starting out, not everything is going to be big." A World Studios summit in New York, where studio leads from across the country compared notes, gave him a clearer sense of what had worked for other people, and what hadn't. He came back with an important lesson: "Sometimes it's good to just step back and understand what small things come first."

Leading a board, running meetings, being the person new members call when they're deciding whether to join, none of that necessarily came naturally to Treston before he started his studio. "As a person that is not very extroverted, it has pushed my boundaries to talk to people and lead people," he said. It's made interviews easier, since he now has a real answer when someone asks him to describe leading a team of thirty.

"I was nervous at first, but I was encouraged," Treston said, thinking back to that October email. "What was the worst that could happen?" A year later, his bet on himself has paid off. Oregon State has a studio with a functioning board, two shipped projects, and a growing group of members.

Treston, for his part, could not be prouder.

He points to one member who joined, put real time into a project, and used that experience to land a product management internship. The interview question was simple: have you ever built something? She could say yes, in detail, because of World Studios. "I was so grateful to hear I was able to help someone this way," he said. "World Studios is about more than helping me. I'm the President, I started this studio. But it's supposed to help others."