Once Fresno State Graphic Design major Evelyn Melendez (Lund Scholar 2023-2024) started saying yes to adventures in London, her comfort zone never felt the same again.
Who hasn’t tried to live more in-the-moment? Get out of your head, look around, just “be there.”
Trouble is, our good intentions to seize the day often wind up as inspiring memes at best, shared with followers at the tap of a finger, while we remain preoccupied and distracted, racing here and there, missing too much of the here and now.
But there’s a handy (and free) device renowned for its ability to interrupt our reflexive habits of mind and proclivities for procrastination. It’s ancient, effective and deceptively simple.
A mantra.
Evelyn with Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “The Swing” (c. 1767), at the Wallace Collection, London, 2024
Lund Scholar Evelyn Melendez, a senior in Fresno State’s Graphic Design program who will graduate next month, discovered the power of this verbal work-around during her London study abroad trip in 2023-2024.
The magic words that nudged her out of her comfort zone and into the life unfolding around her took the form of a simple question: Why not?
Walking back to their flat after a museum tour early in the trip, her roommates noticed an inviting little pub and suggested checking it out, she says. She found herself listing reasons not to.
“In my mind, I have to have [a plan that says] okay, at this time we’ll do this and at this time we’ll do that,” she says. “We were a little tired but also like, let’s experience this. But I was going, ‘I don’t know, was this necessary.’ Then I was just, ‘Why not? Let’s do it. I’m not going to get this experience again, not exactly.’”
At the pub with (clockwise from bottom left): David Villasenor, Jordyn Maxfield, Sydni Weller, Grace Morrow, Evelyn, Yajaira Velasco and a bit of Andrew Turner, 2024
Pushing doubts aside to do something unplanned––meet some Londoners, try a Scotch Egg––paid off.
“We had a blast,” she says. “After that, [I decided] to keep saying yes to things. … Why not? Why am I not going to say yes? I just kept doing it.”
Diving into the moment was new for Melendez. At school, studying and long commutes by bus ate up her time. When opportunities to go out or do something beyond coursework came up, she usually declined.
“My friends were always inviting me to go eat dinner and stuff like that and I was always, ‘No, I’ll be too tired for class the next day’ or ‘I have to go do homework,’” she says. “That was before I went off to London.”
The change began as soon as she heard she’d won an Edward O. Lund Scholarship.
“I think that’s when it started clicking in my head,” she says. “Everybody was, ‘Let’s book tickets here, let’s book tickets there’ and I thought, ‘Yeah. Why not? Why am I going to say no? I only get one, once-in-a-lifetime experience of going to London with my friends.”
In London, Melendez and a small group of classmates––including Lund Scholars Grace Morrow, Yajaira Velasco and Sydni Weller––made it a mission to do something whenever they had free time. They usually ended up exploring spots they happened upon while walking to or from a tour or other class event.
They scouted places for Big Ben selfies that didn’t look like every other tourist’s, found a neighborhood café for a Full English breakfast and got lost riding the Tube. At one point, they wound up in front of a bowling alley. By then, what would come next was obvious: “Let’s go bowl!”
“I really liked the spontaneity of it, how we’d just be, ‘Hey, we found this place, let’s go do it,’” Melendez says. “If we weren’t [walking past] we wouldn’t have found it. That was really cool.”
What could be better after a long day of studying the world’s great artworks than bowling? At All Star Lanes, 2024
One of their final discoveries was a bakery in London’s Chinatown. Velasco and Weller happened to share a birthday that day, so their flat-mates thought, “Why not order a cake?”
That night, they gathered with classmates at the flat to light the candles and sing “Happy Birthday.”
“It was really sweet,” Melendez says. “We all came together, having the cake.”
By the time she left London, Melendez realized that what she calls her “yes mindset” had helped her learn much more than expected.
Sydni Weller and Yajaira Velasco celebrating their joint birthdays in London, 2024
“It really got to me, how independent that I can be and how it can just be spontaneous,” she says. “It felt really good to be independent and making my own decisions.”
Back in Fresno, Melendez went on saying yes, determined to make her senior year memorable. When opportunities come along now, she takes them.
“Homework is homework and I’ll do all that eventually,” she says. “I tell myself, ‘It’s time for me to go out now. I need to learn how to do this.’”
Melendez joined Enseñamos en el Valle Central, a now-paused program that partnered with local high schools and community colleges to help Latino and bilingual students pursue education degrees at Fresno State. She designed identity assets and materials for educational fairs, promotions and meetings, and discovered a lot about her own roots in the Central Valley.
Last summer, she reached a milestone important for maintaining independence in a city without a Tube. She got her driver’s license. It’s helped her to be more spontaneous, she says, making it easy to explore Fresno with her London friends.
They find art, and inspiration, in the most unexpected places.
“We went to Olive Garden the other day and we’re like, ‘the hierarchy of this menu is so well done!” she says. “Or we go somewhere else and we say, ‘no, this is bad, the colors in this are so bad.”
In London or in Fresno, who knows what these young designers and scholars will find next.
Continuing to say yes to such local adventures provides “a creative flow outside of the classroom,” Melendez says.
That’s particularly helpful now, as she works on her final portfolio and personal-brand materials for the 2025 Graphic Design BFA Exhibition, opening May 2. In addition to serving as the event’s treasurer, she’s designing promo materials and helping with fundraising.
With graduation fast approaching, it may be time to revise “why not?” to “what’s next?”
For now, she’s focused on turning out a successful portfolio and BFA show.
She’s focused, but not frozen.
“Studying abroad has made me welcome the mindset of simply saying ‘yes,’ then seeing where it takes me,” she says. “We’ll see. Everything’s up in the air.”
>>> See designs by Evelyn and her classmates at the Fresno State 2025 Graphic Design BFA Show
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