Wow I can’t believe it’s the last day of the program and my last full day in Iowa… It honestly has been a super great experience and leaving is so bittersweet.. I am so lucky to have had this opportunity and I think I definitely made the most out of this experience. I have learned so much. One of the big things I learned this summer was how to focus on my own skills and development academically, its definitely something I hope to bring back with me and not compare myself to peers. I have met so many awesome people here that I hope to stay in contact with when I leave. I know now that I will have friends to visit when I come back to Iowa as well as other states around the US. I had the best roommates that were such a great support system as well as just amazing friends. I also had a great team to work with this summer and great mentors to help us succeed. We had our symposium yesterday and I’m honestly sooo proud of all of us for all we accomplished this summer. I feel like I finally was able to tell people what we did this summer and that alone is a huge accomplishment since it took me a long time to fully understand what we even did! lol I got some public speaking skills in yesterday and I can thank my Toastmasters clubs for getting me there over all these years. Iowa is definitely a gorgeous place. Last night we went to the high trestle trail and it was so peaceful, beautiful, and relaxing to say the least. I can really appreciate the quiet of nature and that bridge was definitely that with all the stars you could see, the river you could hear, and just spending time with friends. Iowa was definitely a nice “go off the grid” place where you can get away and relax out in the open. It has been a great one Iowa and I definitely think I would like to come back eventually. I love you guys and will miss you all so much!! Thank you to everyone that helped me out this summer, interns, mentors, and everyone in VRAC.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the summer!

Well…Its the last week! It’s bittersweet honestly. This weekend was really great with trying to spend time with the rest of the interns for our last weekend together. We had our farewell dinner at Texas Roadhouse which was had really good food. It was great getting to connect with the other interns and get to have some great fun conversations with them. Saturday our mentor asked if we could come in to try to work on the code for our results section to have something but we honestly had no luck really. At our Friday meeting our mentors told us we were going to have a meeting on Monday at 10am.. (today) and this was Friday at 5pm. This is why we decided to come in on Saturday since one hour on Monday before the meeting would not be enough to work on what they wanted. I have a feeling that the results part might not be great for the poster/paper. We still are working on that this week as we have to print the poster tomorrow by 3pm then we finally have the symposium on Thursday.

The summer is coming close to the end, honestly it makes me a little sad to think about. We have had such a great time here. It has surely been an adventure coming here and I have loved every minute of this experience. All the new technologies I have learned, the new people I have met, and just all of the fun activities we have done. Aside from that it is still not over yet. Today particularly I worked on our poster and I think it has been coming out really great. It’s no where near done but it’ll be great in the end. Yesterday we didn’t have AC in the building so Lara and I decided to go to the library to work on stuff until we had the lunch and lecture. The lunch and lecture was really interesting where we had Jared Danielson come and talk to us about different learning techniques within the Veterinary program here at Iowa State that they are doing research on. He showed us an example of blood smears through a tutorial they tested with the students to see if that method worked better then having the professor show the students how to do it. The professor thought that the tutorial was much better then them having to show the students but they spent the same time in the room regardless of the method. I sometimes feel that if I didn’t chose engineering I probably would have chosen some sort of science degree but I would have liked to work more in a lab setting rather then the medical field. Besides that its been a good end to the week.

July 11th & July 12th

Today was honestly a really great day overall. The beginning of the day I went to do scans again and got through a decent amount of bullets (I was left with two to scan for the next day). Afterwards we had a lunch and lecture with Jon Kelly and it was interesting to see the psychology side of things. I actually thought about getting a minor in psychology to help me market myself in the UX world and help me get that human aspect of things but I wasn’t able to because I would go over the max amount of credits with excess hours. After the lunch and lecture we had our MCA presentations. I was starting to feel nervous but I think I still managed to do okay with my presentation. At the end of my presentation when Eliot mentioned how we had less than 3 weeks that we did all of this I felt so proud of myself on how much I really learned and pushed myself to do. I wish I could be more like this during school but I think this became a project I was more excited about. I am finally working on the AR piece and gosh I’m just so excited about this whole project. Below are images of my ongoing project. I somewhat have a product but it doesn’t rotate. I’m still missing some pieces to help the assembly. I then had to assemble the pieces from Maya in Maya to then do the model targeting (still working on this). I’m really enjoying the whole process of finding something to build, design it, model it, dimension it, print it, then assemble it. The next day the main thing I have to say for July 12th is the lunch we had with Dr. Kremer. She is the department chair for the department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering (IMSE). We went to Cafe Beaudelaire and it was such a great lunch with great conversations and food. She is so inspiring and had great advice. After that lunch she made me feel more empowered as a women in tech. The food was also super great. I had a Cuban sandwich and ended up eating a slice of cheesecake which was also delicious. I also forgot to mention that I got the rest of the scanning done today(July 12th)! I’m hoping the scans came out well because that would be great if I didn’t have to redo them. We shall see after this weekend.

Looks like I’ve been MIA for a while.. Oops. Well looks like my last post is from June 27th and a lot has definitely happened since then.

Week of June 27th

The end of this week was good. We kept going with our projects for the major course activity (MCA) which has been a slow process. We went that weekend to the Des Moines art festival which was so much fun! There was a lot of artwork and we didn’t even get to see it all either. We got to talk to some of the artists and a bunch of them had cool stories on how they started and how long they had been doing this. I was amazed at the mediums present there (ceramics, metals, glass, paint, mixed medium, photography, etc). They even had artwork shown from students around the area and can I say there are a lot of talented students in this area!

Week of July 1st

This week had been a very short one but it went well overall. Monday was pretty crazy overall but I got to talk to Mindy about her experience at Google with UX Research. I’ve been looking into UX design and have also been looking into working at Google someday. Tuesday we had our first “class” with the mentors and it honestly was super cool and interesting! We went up to one of the industrial engineering labs and saw the metal 3D printer as well as a part of a windmill. It was super interesting to see what other labs are working on. Wednesday I wasn’t feeling great due to personal things going on (I’m doing a lot better now). The weekend consisted of just hanging out with my roommates. I went to the library twice with Karina to hang out, work on stuff, and draw (something I need to start doing again more). One of the days I decided to go to VRAC to work on my rubik’s cube model as well as the poster layouts. It was pretty productive overall and Lara, Emmanuelle, and two of our mentors decided to go to dinner at a Chinese place. That was a ton of fun and great food. The weekend was very refreshing and I was ready to finally get back to work on Monday.

Week of July 8th

The week started with a defense presentation given by Jamiahus. It was a great presentation even though we didn’t get to stay for the whole time as we had ethics afterwards. Ethics was a really great course as I felt like we brought up very touchy subjects but I was pleasantly surprised at how well we all discussed it without getting defensive or critical of the others views. We were very respectful of each other and I think that’s how the rest of the world should be. The rest of the day I tried really hard to finish my rubiks cube and managed today to finish it! Well.. sort of.. It honestly could be fitting better together but its also because I still had some parts not printed yet so I had to improvise just so I could see the mostly finished product. I’m really proud of myself that I even did all of this! It turned out pretty amazing. We were supposed to present everything today but that ended up being moved to Thursday. I’m kind of glad because now maybe I can add the AR piece that I wanted? We shall see.. The rest of the week hopefully is good. Tomorrow we are back to scanning… yay? It should be alright. I hate when I have too much to do but also hate when I don’t have a lot to do either. I just get all flustered and stressed when there’s a lot to do and not enough time.

June 21st

The end of this rainy day was alright. I had to finally present for the week and I was definitely nervous but I was proud of myself for getting through it so it all worked out in the end. I didn’t really get any critiques on it so I’m not sure what they thought of it overall.

June 22nd

Today we went to brunch and downtown Ames and it was so much fun! We went to Arcadia for brunch and it was this cute little cafe perfect for the rainy weather that morning. Later on we went to the farmers market since the weather cleared up. I ended up getting some strawberry rhubarb jam. There were so many cute shops there too like a gorgeous chocolate and gelato place. I can’t wait to go back again!

June 23rd

Today is Emmanuelle’s birthday! We decided to surprise him by going to Perfect Games for bowling, Jeff’s Pizza for dinner, and ended with a game of giant Uno and cake. It was a really great day! Before all that it was just catching up with chores that I don’t have time during the week to do. It overall was a fantastic weekend and it felt really good to go out and have fun. 🙂

June 24th

Back to work! We started the day out with deeper dives and I’m so glad I am on the 3D printing team! I had sort of done 3D printing in high school and I’m actually surprised at what I still remember. I had been thinking more about what I wanted to do for my project and had come up with some ideas for combining 3D printing and augmented reality (AR). After Nina had mentioned about building a rubiks cube with a 3D printer I had the idea to try to bring one into AR after designing one. Though after looking into how rubik’s cubes are made I decided to just make the whole cube instead of trying to make it mobile. My idea with bringing in the AR is to have the colors of the rubik’s cube be randomly generated onto the blank 3D cube simulating a new puzzle to solve. Basically in the end the goal would be to have an AR rubik’s cube game. Getting a movable part though will be an eventual step.

Today and the end of yesterday have been super great and uplifting. Yesterday I went to the gym for the second time this week (I’m trying to make it a habit to go 3 times a week and maybe this blog will hold me accountable). I realize that I need upbeat music to get me in the zone to work out and get me motivated. Surprisingly after working out and stretching, I woke up this morning not feeling that sore. I also found out yesterday that I got the Deeper Dive that I wanted!! Super excited to be on the 3D printing team! I saw in Alex’s slides that he has 7 different topics we can relate to 3D printing. I noticed the AR one as something I can relate 3D printing to my major. I am planning to take an introduction to AR course in the fall so I would love to have some prior experience with it.

Today we got some free time to ourselves so I decided to finally sit down and work on my presentation for tomorrow.. I’m a bit nervous and hope it goes well since I’ve changed a lot in my presentation from the mock presentation before. Hoping my Toastmasters skills come in handy tomorrow haha. We also had another luncheon lecture with Diana Sloan and it was very different from the others we have had so far. She talked about her experiences and hardships with grad school and how she went about finding support. As a Hispanic myself I felt I could relate to some of the Spanish culture she mentioned. I really enjoyed hearing someone talk about grad school and school in general for what it really is and to remind us that its ok to look for help when needed. After the lecture we saw that Andrew put out some of the past years T-shirt designs. Im excited to see what we come up with and having a free moment to laugh and talk and have fun with the group was really great and was something I can say was much needed to connect with my peers. 🙂

I just wanted to mention the end of yesterday where I went to the gym and it was a much needed workout. I definitely want to go to the gym 3 times a week. I am going to try to get a schedule going because I want it to bleed into the school year since I never really use the gym at school. I felt like I really pushed myself and I was in a determined mood yesterday and was so proud of myself afterwards for it.

Today has been off to a great start. We started the day with a meeting at 10 with our mentors about how to crop the area of the scans we want. I actually found it pretty fun to collaborate and problem solve with my team. We then came back and had another luncheon lecture with Jing Dong who works with transportation research. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from her research but was pleasantly surprised when it was about autonomous vehicles! I had a mentor this year who works at Uber and she had talked to me briefly about the autonomous vehicle work they were doing and it was pretty interesting. The rest of today will consist of finally finishing our scans, craft of research, and a t-shirt design activity. Should be a productive and fun afternoon. 🙂

Stephen gave us this awesome homework assignment of finding two things that have a bad and not intuitive design. I personally love activities like this because it really gets you thinking about what has a good and bad design and what might be frustrating. I have a web and physical example of bad design. The online example is actually a website that Stephen gave me when we had our talk which is hcibib.org. It is a site that has a lot of HCI resources and I thought it was hilarious how it is supposed to be a website talking about UX design, HCI, Accessibility, etc. and it is a poorly designed site. The physical object is the cabinets in our apartment. They don’t have exterior handles so it is impossible to know which way the door opens unless you just try it.

Example hcibib.org

Example Kitchen Cabinets

How could we improve these? The way we could improve the website would be a lot of things. The colors and spacing could be a lot better. There could be a more organized way to set up the links maybe in a menu or something better. With the cabinets even a simple handle on the correct side to open it would be helpful.

This week so far has been good but also very busy.

June 10th

Today went really well overall. We started Solidworks like I mentioned before in my last post. It honestly has been going really well. I feel like I’m getting the hang of it. I really like the combination of trying to figure out the geometry of the shape and having it like a puzzle. I definitely think I want to do the 3D printing deeper dives after doing this. I also met with Steven and he read through “My Journey through College” blog post! I was so glad to hear that he also read it. We talked a bit about some of the stuff I had mentioned in there and also just kind of spinning off ideas on what type of topics/jobs I might be interested in later on. We talked about HCI overall, some schools that have HCI masters programs, UX design, and few other things. He also gave me a book on sketching that I need to make some time to look at and go through. He said that its great that I’m keeping my options open and looking into a lot of different fields. He gave me a link that ironically has a bad and confusing design called hcibib.org. Again overall a really great day.

June 11th

Today was a crazy long day and didn’t get to blog really yesterday. My team got to the lab at 8:30 to start scanning and we finished around 11:00. We then went to the luncheon lecture for Bernard Canniffe which was set up differently from the other presenters. Eliot and Evrim kind of took the route of starting with their early career on how they got to where they are now but Bernard took the route of showing current and past projects in the graphic design department. It actually took me by surprise that it was more community based projects because that’s not what I think of when I think of graphic design but when I saw the types of things they created it made more sense (brochures, fliers, etc). It was an interesting take on it. After that we went back to the lab and we started scanning again for another two hours. Then we came back to have an HCI introduction class taught by Stephen and even though it was about the history (I’m not the most interested in history) I really enjoyed it overall and seeing the video of their version of technology that was supposed to happen in 2011 was incredible. I loved comparing it to what we have now and was wondering how they managed to make a video like that back then. We have a homework assignment due friday for that and its to find bad designs and explain about how it could be made better. I lovee doing this kind of stuff and am excited to do this assignment. Afterwards we had the craft of research which was informative but ran a little long so we were at our yoga class at 6 instead of 5. The yoga class was much needed and I felt so much better after going to yoga. I need to start doing yoga more often because it seriously was de-stressing and relaxing. In the end it was a good day but also busy as could be. Basically went non stop today from 8:30-7…

Prepare to read a really long post (probably the longest post I’ll have). I wanted to have a specific story dedicated to my feelings and journey as an undergraduate student. I was inspired to write this after Eliot’s luncheon lecture about his own career path.

Time to make a change

I’ll first start my story with the first university I attended in fall 2015 which was Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL (FAU). I was a commuter student for two years at this university and would pretty much have the same routine everyday. Go to classes, eat lunch with some friends, go home, work on homework, eat dinner with family, sleep, and repeat. Since I was just going to classes and then back home it was hard to socialize with others more often. I decided my sophomore year that I was tired of feeling like I didn’t have that many friends or activities outside school work. I decided to look at the list of clubs on campus to see what I was interested in. Going through the organizations I found one that caught my eye called Toastmasters. The name was so unique so I looked into what it was about. I saw that it was a club to help people learn leadership and public speaking skills. I figured I could use better public speaking skills and I liked the idea of being a leader so I decided to go to a meeting. That meeting changed my life. I had met so many nice people and to this day claim that I have never been in a room with this many nice and supportive people. I also found another organization to join and that was Society for Women Engineers (SWE). This club I had heard a lot more about and it was perfect for me being a pre-computer engineering student. However, I never really felt close to the members in SWE compared to the members of Toastmasters. It seemed like everyone had been in the club already for a while and became really close so I felt a bit out of place. After all this time of feeling in a routine and feeling like I didn’t have many friends and activities (minus the Toastmasters group since those meetings were the highlight of my week) I had the idea of transferring schools. I decided to apply to the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL (USF) and was accepted for summer 2017.

Transitioning into USF

My journey of moving to a university four hours away from home had begun. I was a little nervous and sad to leave my family but I had a good feeling about it. The first summer I was there was a little boring as the campus is much quieter during the summer compared to the school year. I was taking two courses so I wouldn’t fall even more behind on graduating so it definitely ended up being a more relaxed summer. That summer I also felt kind of lonely but I knew that this wasn’t a good representation of how the university normally is since I had multiple people tell me not to worry. I did however have a good time with my roommates that summer with getting a pet fish, drawing together, and going to the pool a few times. The following years I joined the female engineering learning community which was great as I had made a lot of friends in engineering who I could relate to. We had a couple of events in the common room to get us to hang out together and some of us went to events outside of that. I felt so much better about being at USF because living on campus made it so easy to meet up with classmates at the library or engineering buildings to study and just hang out. I had also joined the Toastmasters club at USF and I helped it grow overtime and have now been the secretary for 3 years! I had never really been an officer of an organization before and I absolutely love it. I get to collaborate with other officers and come up with new ideas for our club’s growth. I also was able to attend a bunch of tech related workshops and club meetings to learn new topics in tech I might not have known about and just to make more friends. Being here at this university and living on campus has made it so much easier to meet with friends, study with others in person, and explore new organizations. It has been a really great experience so far and continues to be.

How I decided on my major

My major at USF is computer engineering. People are always wondering how I decided on it especially since I’ve pretty much stuck with it since freshman year. It actually started when I was in preschool believe it or not. I found a yearbook from my preschool back in high school and there was a page with everyone’s picture and below was what they wanted to be when they grew up. Everyone had the basic answer that a 4 year old might say such as dancer, movie star, singer, fire fighter, artist, etc. However, when I looked at my photo I saw “computer worker(or programmer I can’t quite remember)” written underneath. I just laughed because I know my mom has been saying for years how I said I wanted to work with computers. My dad works in Information Technology (IT) and I just saw him as my role model as a kid and decided I wanted to be like him. As I got older he took my sister and I to take your kids to work day and I thought it was cool even if I didn’t understand anything he was saying about what he does. As the time went by and I was learning more about tech, I saw that the stuff my dad did working in IT wasn’t that interesting to me. My dad really wanted me to go for management information systems (MIS) since I kept saying I wanted to do what he did and that was his path in school. However, I wanted to be more creative, inventive, and innovative with my degree and I was not finding my definition of that in MIS. I started to look into engineering since I thought of it as more of a design type degree. That is when I decided computer engineering would be the right major for me.

Some doubts and impostor syndrome

Even though I chose computer engineering, there were times where I started to overthink whether computers was even what I wanted to do still. I had thought back to my high school days of taking a bunch of tech classes to prep for my degree in computer engineering and I remembered how some of the classes weren’t that interesting. I didn’t mind the Photoshop and video editing classes I took but there were some others that ended up not being that interesting overall that mostly had to do with programming. In college I started looking into other engineering majors and tried to see if there were any that were more interesting (I looked into every engineering major FAU offered since this was when I was in doubt mostly). There was one course however I really enjoyed that I took at FAU and that course was logic design where we had to build circuits on a bread board and draw out diagrams and I thought it was so fun. I realize overall that I am a visual learner so drawing things out for me helps me understand things a lot better. That course got me thinking maybe I wanted to go more towards the hardware/electrical route. The only time I switched my major was to electrical engineering at FAU but soon afterwards I decided to switch back to computer engineering after seeing all the radio, optics, and wireless courses I’d have to take and it was definitely a bit of a turn off since that wasn’t super interesting either. I also was not very strong in physics so that wasn’t going to help either. After finally sticking with computer engineering, I started looking at the courses I would be taking and I started to get excited on my preconceived opinions about what would be covered. When I got to the courses and started looking through the textbooks I had really been disappointed about the material we would be learning. This has actually been a common thing throughout my undergraduate years. Although my classes aren’t super interesting, I still ended up sticking with computer engineering and still to this day wonder what I will do with it in the end.

My first internship experience

I have tried so hard to find my passion in my major even with me disliking most of my courses and still feeling like there’s something missing. I mentioned in the last paragraph how I really want to have a career based around design, innovation, creativity, and invention. I have looked through a lot of different types of jobs that I might want to do and have networked with so many different people because of this obsession with having to know what I want to do. I have jumped on every mentor ship opportunity, every tech related group, and every person I come across in tech to talk to them about what they do to get an idea. The first time I really had been able to talk to people about tech work was at my first internship at Raymond James financial services company. I was put on a team of database administrators and to this day still have not taken a database course. I felt like they really placed me in a not so great position and even when my manager was asking me the first day if I had ever dealt with MySQL and back end programming and databases my answer was no and he was just as surprised as me to see that I was put on this team. Since I would have to learn so much before even being able to work on a project for the team, I was given something else slightly different that wasn’t too bad to figure out. Since it had to do with a lot of waiting for people to get back to me I decided to look into the different tech positions they had in the IT department to figure out maybe by the end of summer what I wanted to do. I felt that since I didn’t know what type of position I wanted it led me to be put in a position that wasn’t right for me. I decided that I would have to know what I wanted to go for the next summer if I was offered to come back so that’s what I did the entire summer. I networked with a lot of people in the fields of project management, systems engineering, back end development, front end development, UX Design, and many others. At first the main ones I ended up liking and focusing on were project management, front end development, and UX design. I really liked project management because I am a very organized person and like to keep order and like the leadership aspect of it. What I liked about front end development was it was a very visual way to program. I saw what the other interns were doing for project management and I felt like it wasn’t as involved as much as I wanted to be. I felt like front end development was more challenging and I would have a more impactful project to work on if that is what I chose the following summer. As for the UX design team, I never really got to learn that much about them. At the end of the summer I was accepted to come back and decided on front end development but I was a little afraid that I had to learn Angular and JavaScript. So even though I chose front end development I really wanted to know more about the UX design team but they don’t have interns and I was really bummed about it and I had a good feeling about it too. I tried talking to the team throughout the summer but they were always so busy so it never really happened. I still felt like front end development might not be for me because it still was lot of coding which I have never been a fan of so I kept looking for a lot of opportunities of other internships within UX design.

Finding out about UX design

So like I mentioned, UX design I first learned about at Raymond James where I was looking to see what type of tech jobs were available to me to look into. The following encounter I had with UX was with a fellowship called Rewriting the Code (RTC) (Highly recommend to female computer science and engineering students!). In the fellowship application it asked what topics in tech you are interested in and there were a ton a to chose from, Blockchain, Fintech, Web development, Game development, Hardware, UX/UI etc. The first time I applied I chose hardware, web development, robotics, AI, and mobile development. I unfortunately didn’t get into the fellowship but there was still a member option which really was just being added into a Facebook group. When I first joined the group I noticed that they had affinity groups or just other groups based on certain tech topics. I joined the ones based on my choices on the application however I started to realize I wasn’t really interested in some of the topics I had chosen. The second time I applied to the fellowship (which I haven’t heard back from yet) I chose the topics of UX/UI, mobile development, web development, and game development. I loved and still love the content that the UX/UI affinity group posts and I feel like it definitely could be a field that I want to be apart of.

Personal projects in UX

Besides joining RTC I actually found out my school was having an Intro to UX/UI workshop with the club WICSE (Women In Computer Science and Engineering). I had finally been glad to see my school have something relating to UX/UI since we have no courses or clubs that really relate to this new field I am interested in. When I went to the workshop I felt I had an idea of what they were going to talk about due to the hours of research I had done on the topic. There were a few people from different companies working in the UX field and I ended up chatting to one of them about the work she does. I ended up talking with her further over LinkedIn telling her my worries and fears of getting into the field. Being a computer engineer trying to get into a design role is not the easiest because the work you do as an engineer is very different from what designers learn in school. I felt super behind on my knowledge and there is also just so much that goes into UX/UI. When I voiced these concerns to her she asked if I wanted an accountability partner to help me work on a personal project. (In UX/UI, personal projects in a portfolio are super important to get a job). I agreed and found a list of potential projects and ended up choosing to redesign the CNN web page. I scheduled deadlines of when I would have things done (I have not finished this project but I do have a mini prototype/mockup – https://xd.adobe.com/view/ac0dae59-847f-4830-6b41-4567cc6e448e-da3c/?fullscreen). From the research, to the wireframes, to the design, it has all been the process I’ve gone through to get to this prototype so far.

Self teaching… Not as easy as it sounds

I felt like my design skills were not that great so I had looked on how to build my visual design skills. I found a course on Lynda that I am currently still getting through that is a path of becoming a graphic designer since visual design skills of layout, color, and typography are common things UX/UI designers should know. Though I have been trying my best to learn the stuff on my own I still feel like I am missing the formal education that is mapped out for you by a school or online program. I feel like I don’t know what I need to know or what to focus on. Studying everything is a little overwhelming and doesn’t seem very effective. I feel like it is much more difficult to push yourself out of your comfort zone when you are teaching yourself certain things whereas in a classroom setting you are being pushed harder with the feedback given which you also don’t get much of by doing things on your own. I personally like a structured setting and with UX that is a very difficult thing to find online. I have looked and looked and I haven’t found a great online self teaching program that is also free. One day if I ever find a bunch of different resources I would love to create a course or blog or something on how to learn UX/UI design on your own without formal education through an institution and for free. First I need to find the right path for myself before I can be ambitious and share it with others.

Going to grad school for design?

I had been looking for universities that have degrees relating to UX/UI design in some way shape or form. I started thinking about higher education because of what I mentioned before with the fact that I feel like the stuff I’m learning on my own isn’t enough to get me a job later with the background I have. I don’t know if that’s true or not but I felt like without any prior design experience it would be very difficult to prove myself as an aspiring designer just with stating I’ve learned the tools. I decided to look for schools that had design or UX/UI courses. I found at some point that Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is a degree that mixes technology, design, and psychology into one degree. I thought it was really cool and also very applicable to what I might want to do. It mixes my love of art and degree of technology and my interest in psychology and the mind (I have not yet taken a psychology class but will in the fall). I thought this was perfect. I came to realize quickly that not many universities offer this type of program or they have something similar under a different name (which makes it even more complicated to find it). I basically tried finding lists of universities with HCI masters programs and only found a handful and they were Carnegie Mellon, Iowa State University, Georgia Tech, and a few others. When I was looking deeper into these programs, this was also around the time I was looking for internships for summer of 2019 and had no luck. So I started looking instead for research programs since research is a big part of masters programs.

Finding a research position

I went to talk to the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) to start looking for research programs since they handle all research type positions and I had been curious to know more about my options. I met with one of the research mentors and he had mentioned the option of a research program over the summer which are called REU programs (Research Experience for Undergraduates) and I thought ok this would be a great option. He walked me through the process of how to chose programs that I wanted to apply to and told me to probably have about 6-8 programs I was interested in to have a better chance of acceptance. I went to the NSF (National Science Foundation) website and found the programs that might have related to HCI and found a few that were related to it. In the end I ended up choosing 9 programs to apply to which were – Rochester Institute of Technology, Galludet University, UNC Charlotte, University of Florida, Iowa State University, Washington State University, Carnegie Mellon, DREU (this program matches you to a university program based on your interests), and finally the University of Texas Arlington. After applying to these programs I ended up with three offers, two potential interviews, and the rest I was declined from. I say potential interviews because I had been already accepted into programs I had an interest in. The three offers I received was for Iowa State University, DREU which they chose New York University (NYU), and University of Florida. I finally made the decision to go to Iowa State (where I am currently writing this blog post from) and it honestly was the best decision to come here.

Iowa State REU (so far)

The REU program I chose at Iowa State has been an amazing experience even if we are only 2 weeks into the program. I have loved every moment of it since I got off the plane and met with the other interns. From the other interns I’ve been with, to the mentors we have for our projects, to the professors that are here giving us lectures, the technology they use, and just the endless amount of opportunities. I have only been here two weeks but this school has really made me already start wondering if I would want to do a masters in HCI here. I’m hoping by the end of the program Ill see if going for a graduate degree is something I want to do and if it’ll be here at Iowa State but honestly who knows what the future holds. I want to take on every opportunity I can, learn as much as I can, and talk to as many people as I can.

Thank You!

This is my story up until now within my undergraduate schooling. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I still apologize for it being so long but I really appreciate those who took the time to read through it. Thank you to everyone who has been there through all of these times the good and the bad. Thank you to my family, friends, coworkers/interns, and just anyone who I’ve had the chance to network with. All of you have been apart of my journey and I have learned so much from each of you and I’m so grateful for that.

Sadly I couldn’t come up with a good title for this post but I guess it was bound to happen since we have to post everyday.

Anyways this week has been off to a great start I believe I already mentioned in my blog post yesterday about the C++ courses we had yesterday but never got to mention what happened in the afternoon. We had a meeting with our mentors to already start showing us the machines we will be working with and they chose me to go first to work with John in the other lab with the FVM system. It wasn’t that bad at all to learn and I am a visual learner so the fact that it was a demonstration I just followed what he did and was able to figure it out completely! I felt so proud of myself for figuring it out so quickly. Then we got a little sidetracked and talked about 3D printing as a whole and when that happened he had mentioned to me about 3D printing in metal, ink, and even food! It was all seeming very interesting and he mentioned that if I wanted he could show me the lab upstairs where the 3D printers are. I know I love UX/UI design but I think I want to try to learn more about 3D modeling and printing since it seems so cool and id love to learn more about what you can really do with it and its applications.

Today however has already been super great. We had our first luncheon lecture and when I saw on the website that it was Eliot I was super excited to hear what he was going to talk to us about as he is someone (along with Stephen) that I really wanted to talk to just about everything from career choices, learning more about myself, finding what could be my job that I love someday as well as just getting some advice. I honestly felt super connected to his story throughout the lecture on what he had been thinking and experiences he had that I feel like are super similar to how I’m feeling now. He talked a lot about how he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, he thought he had a perfect idea of what job he wanted but then had a friend who basically got his dream job came back and told him about how he didn’t get to do what he thought, he was only working on a tinyy piece of the project that feels like you are barely contributing to a project and feel like what you are doing is so insignificant, etc. I feel that way, well actually I don’t want to feel that way once I get into a job. I feel like I could write an entire post about how I feel regarding this topic and maybe I will since it always feels like a lot to explain to everyone. I wont put all the details in here or my post would end up being a mile long but I just wanted to say that I really felt connected to Eliot and his past experiences as it relates a lot to what I’m going through now. I am excited to share my story and hopefully see if he can give me some advice.

Let’s start with yesterday. It was filled with a lot of fun but exhausting activities. We first started the day off with learning about our projects and more specifics on it. When my team presented I was really confused on how it all was going to work and what exactly we would be doing. We then went to lunch with our mentors and it actually was a great time with all of them! They were all super nice and understanding and helpful. I feel like when we aren’t sure of what we are doing they will help us but will still allow us to try to figure it out instead of them giving us the answers which is great learning experience. We also had the craft of research lecture with Andrew and he did a great job explaining to us the different kinds of research papers and research methods. After the lecture our team specifically had the chance to get a lab tour upstairs and see some of the 3D scanning technologies and we each got to scan our hands (picture to be shown below). Last but not least was the scavenger hunt which was really cool seeing the campus more and getting used to where everything was. After writing all of this I see now why I was absolutely exhausted at the end of the day.

Today is probably about half way over and we have done a lot already! We took the Myers Briggs test which I actually had taken before and this time got ISFJ instead of INFJ. We got to talk to our teams on what our strengths and weaknesses are and I actually feel pretty good about our strengths and weaknesses and feel they actually complement each other very well. After we got to learn more about the library services and it was super informative. Now when I go to my university ill have to check it out and see if they are similar. Finally, we got to test out the VR equipment which I have never tried before but surprisingly it wasn’t that bad. I feel that I get dizzy a little easily and the C6 room I think I felt worse about then the goggles but the goggles were better than I expected. The next part of the day after this blog post will be ARG training (no idea what this is yet) and a tour of the State gym (which I need to actually go to soon).

This summer is off to a great start already and I cant wait to see the amazing things we all do.