Getting Started ✅

I realized the importance of a supportive network back in the summer of 2019 after attending demo day. When I met my sister’s colleagues, I felt as if I had connected to a group of like-minded people who genuinely wanted to assist me in my career. They shared their wisdom to me as well as several of the resources that had helped them. I wanted to expand this network from a group of computer scientists to include UX Designers as well.

For the remainder of 2019, I began my quest of expanding my network through reading Medium articles on UX Design on their experiences without actually talking to them. After some time, I was seriously concerned on how I was going to actually start my career or what exactly a UX Designer does. The articles only gave off so much detail.

In the summer of 2020 during a hackathon: Spectra 2.0, a message from a young UX Designer named Grace Ling who had created Design Buddies — a virtual community of UX Designers — caught my attention. I joined her community through and introduced myself in the introductions channel. I was notified that I had received a response from Stormy Jackson, a UX Designer from USC. I set up a virtual coffee chat with her to learn about her experiences. I was really grateful when she not only shared all of her valuable insights but a list of resources as well. This was the conversation that really made me confident to continue expanding my network. Throughout the following weeks, I met several accomplished UX Designers such as Vicky Vo, an award winning UX Designer, Madu Ghanesh, a product manager at Amazon, and Antonio Garcia, an experienced UX Designer who had started his own podcast. I also joined Design at Columbia: a virtual community of designers that originated at the University of Columbia.

I was amazed at the support I had received from everyone. With the advice from everyone I had met, I developed a rough draft of a career roadmap, discovered new communities, UX Design tools, and gained access to several resources. I began with Google’s Material Design and Intro to UX Design from Georgia Tech. Yet, I was missing the purpose of why I was learning besides the fact that I wanted to become a UX Designer. Since all of the people, learning, and resources had emphasized solving a user’s problem, my next move was finding a project to work on, something to redesign, and not just for the aesthetics of an app, but to make it better for app users to interact with.

I struggled several times. I was clueless on where to begin. I kept on thinking about problems to solve that I was not truly interested in. It resulted that one of my biggest problems was right in front of me, and that it affected several people around the world my age ever since the Covid-19 pandemic began: learning effectively in a virtual setting.