Photos credits: Jaineel Shah, Kyle Oldfield, Valdemar Haugaard Olsen

The equinox may be a few weeks out, but here in the States, Labor Day weekend marks the cusp of the seasons, when we must transition from the long, diverting days of summer to the deskbound marathon of fall. This is especially true for those of you in school, as students, faculty and staff reunite at campuses the world over. As always, Core77 is proud to serve as the premier online resource for industrial design students, prospective, enrolled, and graduated, and this September we are pleased to bring a special editorial focus to design education.

When it comes to design students, Core has long offered multiple platforms for exposure and expert advice: Besides accepting submissions for editorial consideration, we're happy to host thousands of free portfolios on our sister site Coroflot is (did we mention its free?); we offer students the opportunity to strive for glory in our annual awards program; and our dedicated Students and Schools discussion board offers a venue for direct feedback and comments from designers from the world over. We understand that (for better or for worse) it can be easy to lose yourself in the forums so we're revisiting the archives and have compiled handy Discussion Board digests, which we'll be publishing over the next couple of weeks.

Yet the higher education system is changing before our very eyes as the very definition of industrial design expands to include human factors, interaction and service, among other emerging disciplines. As with our popular Design Gatekeepers and Getting Hired series, we're pleased to present D-School Futures, comprising interviews with the chairs of ten top American industrial design programs. Whether you're considering grad school as an undergrad or professional, or you're simply curious about how things have changed (or not) since your own D-School days, this series is not to be missed—check out the first one with Wayne Chung of Carnegie Mellon University and stay tuned for more.

Meanwhile, our Hack2School special feature remains chock full of tips, tricks and lifehacks for undergrads of all stripes (ID or otherwise). Plus, we've refreshed the Design Schools homepage—long overdue for an update—with a few new pieces to complement perennial favorites such as Choosing a Design School and 1,000 Words of Advice for Design Students. While our Education category includes a broad range of initiatives, the Design Schools page is, as always, expressly intended as a one-stop shop for design students—bookmark it now for future reference as we'll be adding the new content over the next few weeks.