After suffering from sports-related knee injuries during his senior year of high school, Colin Behr, senior in industrial design, was forced to hang up his basketball shoes and retire the idea of playing in college.

With more time on his hands than ever before, his father, a graphic designer, gave him old sketchbooks. Behr began drawing every day. He soon became obsessed with drawing and used it as a distraction to get over basketball.

Behr said he turned the idea of “shooting jump shots every day into drawing a picture every day.”

Today, Behr is pursuing a career in footwear and apparel design and will intern at the Todd Snyder design studio in New York this summer, after winning the $5,000 Ruth Glock Memorial Scholarship, along with the Todd Snyder internship.

“I just loved drawing, ever since I was a kid, so I think that love of art was always there,” Behr said. “It just didn’t translate into footwear until the end of high school.”

Behr said that basketball players are often associated with liking shoes and he was, “always obsessed with shoes and the whole footwear scene.”

Once he was finished with basketball, Behr said his mother pushed him to dress differently and converted him from wearing Jordan sweats and Nikes every day to winning “Best Dressed” during his senior year of high school.

When it came to footwear, Behr said he had to learn everything online through blogs and articles. He found inspiration from men like Pharrell Williams, a singer, and Tinker Hatfield, a designer for Nike.

“At the end of my high school years I was reading everything about him that I could find,” Behr said about Hatfield, who Behr said he believes is the greatest shoe designer of all time.

“I think I pulled different tendencies from these guys in different industries, and how they were individuals within themselves, and how creative they were, and pulled them into my own world,” Behr said.

Behr attended The Fashion Show 2012 and said he vividly remembers sitting in the crowd while he decided to add a double major in apparel, merchandising and design.

After seeing Todd Snyder, menswear designer and Iowa State alumnus, show his collection at the 2012 show, the industrial engineer later sought out Snyder for an internship.

“Honestly, I’m expecting to get knocked on my ass,” Behr said about the internship. Men’s apparel is still an unfamiliar environment for him — and that’s what he wants.

Behr said he is most excited to learn from his upcoming summer experience after having a hard time connecting with the women’s wear-based apparel classes he has taken this semester.

He said in the long run he does know he can take these techniques and apply them to menswear, but at the moment it has been hard.

Behr completed a footwear program offered at the London College of Fashion last summer where he designed six different shoes to be sold together in a collection.

After completing the program, Behr said he decided he prefers designing for men.

“I think I enjoy it more because when I design, I like designing stuff that I would wear and I just find a hard connection with that when I do women’s stuff because I can’t picture myself wear it,” Behr said.

After interning with New Balance during the fall and putting a lot of energy into footwear, Behr said he has used this semester to widen his knowledge on apparel overall.

Behr has also been involved in an independent study where he’s designing a jewelry line.

“I think I’m just kind of taking this new thing head on and really trying to adapt to this mindset of not being afraid to fail,” Behr said.

Behr and Andrew Paulsen, senior in apparel product development, designed a menswear line, “Raw Paradise,” that was featured in The Fashion Show 2014. One of the garments from the line, “Raw Paradise 1,” won first place in the menswear category.

Behr said he and Paulsen first sat down during the first week of February to design the garments that were due March 11. With only one month, Behr said the whole developmental process was very raw and kind of rough, which led to the line’s name, “Raw Paradise.”

Paulsen said the pair skipped steps like creating a mood board for harmonized inspiration and went right into planning silhouettes and the desired season they would design for.

After wasting eight yards of fabric and a good sum of money, the men said round two of their dyeing process went better than they expected and resulted in a fabric that had a faint animal print in the background with a watercolor effect on top in different shades of maroon and teal.

Paulsen had more knowledge on the technical aspects and Behr said Paulsen became a mentor for him throughout the process.

“I hope the best of luck to him at Todd Snyder and I know he’s going to kill it,” Paulsen said. “Hopefully one day we can meet up and collaborate again in the future.”