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Today’s interview features people from our very own UXA community—Caleb Sun and Alana Wu! They’ll be sharing their wisdom on recruitment season and the overall job-seeking process.
🦝 Caleb Sun: LinkedIn 🐋 Alana Wu: LinkedIn
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I'm a senior in the School of Design, studying communications design with a minor in HCI. Although my role has changed from a more technical product designing space to a more front facing visual space, many people with a strong visual background feel that UI/UX is a way to still do creative work while having the benefits of being at a tech company.
I’m a senior in Decision Sciences and HCI, going into digital product design. Outside of that I love to dance, paint murals, and bike a lot!
Why UX? I wanted to do something thats more creative, but has potential to be more impactful rather than pure expression. Coming to CMU undecided, HCI seemed to really fit that. The more I’ve done it, the more that I’ve realized I really love the understanding people part, really put myself in their shoes, as well as being able to create something!
In general, HCI is a way of thinking that can be applied to any scenario or discipline. I want to take these skills with me in anything I try in the future.
My previous internship at CSL [sophomore year] was a bit more of what you would expect from a lot of companies looking for UI/UX interns. A lot of the more immature companies with design practices don't have as much structure or logistical practices with design.
Caleb functioned on a scrum-like sprint basis where he would receive an assignment every two weeks to work on. These tasks could be anything from creating a new icon to documenting every user flow within the app. In essence, Caleb stepped in to fill the gaps where the design team couldn’t.
This past summer at Dropbox, I sat in between the interactive team and the brand experience team. My large intern project was to redesign an entire web page within dropbox.com with a little bit of data visualization.
In the last few weeks I did a little bit more work with brand experience such as redesigning what a interstitial button loading state would look like or exploring new motion graphic techniques within the product.
I was a product design intern at SeatGeek, a startup ticketing company. There were 21 UX designers on the team, 6 researchers and all the rest in product, but not specific UX roles.
The biggest project I had was working on their “Venue map exploration” feature which allows users to browse all the different levels venue [concert, baseball game, etc] to see what food or merch is available if you were planning ahead of the event.