<aside> 🕯️ Pictured to the right are CMU students Shannon Lee, Shannon Lin, Nicole Xiang, and Megan Yim. Read what they have to say about UX internship application season!

🐱 Shannon Lee: LinkedIn

🐸 **Shannon Lin: LinkedIn & Instagram

🐻 Nicole Xiang: **LinkedIn

🐼 Megan Yim: LinkedIn

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🎃 Introduce yourself: what’s your name, major, year and why are you interested in UX?

🐱 SLee: Shannon Lee, Design, Junior ‘25. UX plays an important role in grounding and guiding my designs to address emerging needs and wicked problems. It serves as the catalyst for fostering meaningful conversations and ensures accessible experiences by leveraging thorough research and futures thinking methodologies.

🐸 SLin: Shannon Lin, BXA Design and Decision Science, 2024. I know I like working with people and creating for people, so working in UI/UX feels very natural. You create something that’s easy for people to understand, easy for people to use, and easier for their everyday lives.

🐻 NX: Hello! My name is Nicole and I’m a senior in Information Systems and HCI. I first got into HCI, particularly UX, is when I took a design fundamentals course and that’s when I started wondering about who I’m creating solutions for. Having done some projects in HCI courses made me realize that I really enjoy the human-centered part of design and the fact that we solve problems for people, not just machines. That’s why I’m interested in UX!

🐼 MY: Hi! I’m Megan Yim. I am a junior studying Business Administration with an additional major in Human-Computer Interaction. I am interested in UX because I think I have learned how important being user-centered is. Through business, I have gotten to see how important understanding your customers is to a business’ success and, now with HCI, I want to learn more about how through the design of different products, we can make customers’ experiences better.

🎃 What UX related activities did you participate in in the past summer, and how did you find these opportunities?

🐱 SLee: Last summer, I interned as a UX Designer at Govtech Singapore’s Accessibility (A11y) Team. During my time there, I helped conduct and organize research on different booking flows across the government’s digital system to identify pain points and create user journey maps, storyboards, and wireframes. I also helped prototype UI solutions that aimed at redefining communication methods in public service booths to make government services more accessible and user-friendly.

I was lucky to have found this position late in the application process as my friends who had interned there before recommended me to check out Govtech’s spreadsheet of available intern positions on their website.

🐸 SLin: I was a product design intern at Asana for the Design Systems team, and first found the job posting on their website.

🐻 NX: *While I didn’t do a UX internship this past summer, I did work with product designers very closely. Many things they do are similar to what we learn in HCI courses like Interaction Design Studio, such as having critique sessions, iterations, design thinking approach, etc. But there are many external factors that limit their design process, especially the product timelines.

In terms of finding UX opportunities, I applied throughout September & October and heard back by end of November. (Note that design opportunities are usually both Fall and Spring unlike PM/SWE.) I applied to these either through LinkedIn jobs page or from company pages directly, and I just wanted to say that most of the offers I got were without referrals so while referrals can speed up the process, they are not required to get the internship!*

🐼 MY: In the past summer, I started working as a Product Design Intern at a Pittsburgh start-up called Behaivior, which focuses on creating wearables to help patients in addiction and mental health recovery stay on track with their recovery process. I found this opportunity through directly contacting the founder of the company since I was interested in their mission and talking to her about potential opportunities at the start-up for me.

🎃 If you had to apply to these activities, what part(s) of your application do you think helped you stand out?

🐱 SLee: I think having projects that demonstrated an interest and understanding of good UX and systems thinking helped me stand out. More specifically, catering the type of project I showed to the interviewers to be best aligned with the work their team does (in this case, in relation to accessibility and digital exclusion of the elderly) definitely played in my favor.

🐸 SLin: On my application they mentioned liking my extracurriculars a lot, especially ScottyLabs and TEDx. I know a common bit of advice is to avoid group/team projects in a portfolio, but for me it helped showcase my passions and sense of collaboration in both my personality and work culture, especially during interviews.

🐻 NX: When I applied to UX internships, I didn’t have any prior industry experience in design. Luckily, for all of the interviews, I had to do a case walkthrough (a presentation of selected past projects) and I think that was what made up for the lack of prior experience. The projects I presented were diverse (from UX research & design to design consulting), which helped me stand out. But I think the most important element to successful interviews is your mindset. I treated interviews like conversations — it’s just two people wanting to learn more about each other. I think interviewers (usually) appreciate this and it makes the entire mood much lighter.

🐼 MY: I think one thing that made me stand out was that I was able to speak to my experience in wireframing from HCI courses in the past. I think showing the company that I already had a good understanding of what wireframing was and design reviews really helped me because they knew that I could dive right into product design projects once I started.

🎃 What did you struggle with during previous application seasons, and knowing these struggles, how would you have approached/are approaching application season differently this year?

🐱 SLee: I struggled most with having a portfolio that lacked a cohesive direction, which influenced how I wasn’t able to articulate my skillsets in a manner most salient to each of the different roles I applied for. This year, I am working on designing my portfolio to have more cohesion within each of the sub-spaces my work falls in.

🐸 SLin: I was always very anxious and bad at reaching out on this stuff, so I’ve gone through so many interviews blind. I’d recommend asking the interviewer beforehand to see what type of interview it is (Ex: portfolio vs behavioral vs collaborative vs design challenge, etc.) and if there are any preferred materials. I also encourage reaching out to others for portfolio reviews and design challenges, it would have saved me a lot of suffering and 2 am research.

🐻 NX: There wasn’t particular struggle but just parts that were challenging / required lots of patience. My application season mostly consisted of waiting time so having a good mindset is key to getting to the finish line. The part I found the most challenging was creating an engaging case presentation. These are usually time limited (~30 min to 1 hr) so I had to think about what parts to highlight and how to present them. If I were to do it again, I would get feedback from professors and do more practice rounds with them & my peers in HCI.