Part 1: Why I Applied to UX Research Internships
This is Part 1 in a 5-part series for Social Science PhD students on how to apply for UX Research internships. Read Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 here.
I am a Sociology PhD student at UC Irvine. I am primarily a qualitative researcher, and I study gender, technology, culture and inequality in India. I have never worked outside a university or in a non-academic role; and as a social scientist, I don’t have a background in engineering, pure sciences, or design. This summer, I completed a UX Research Internship with the Fitbit team at Google, in San Francisco.
Many academics in social science are looking to transition to industry jobs at the moment. If you are one of them, or if you are wondering how to explore industry jobs, perhaps this series of articles will be useful to you. I describe why I decided to explore UXR internships, what my application process was like, how to prepare for interviews, and what according to me are the most common mistakes made by social scientists applying to these roles.
Disclaimer: This article is based entirely on my personal experience of going through the hiring process for UX research internship roles in 2021–2022.
What is UX Research?
There is a lot of information out there about what UX Research or User Experience Research is — very broadly and simply, it is about conducting research with users to create, improve, and/or evaluate products and services. User research is aimed at improving the usability of products and services by focusing on the end users. For instance, maybe you are a company that wants to create a meditation app for women. You might start by interviewing or surveying women of various ages who meditate, and learn about what they would find useful in an app. This would be a form of user research. Here is a short article to break down what doing UX research, and qualitative UX research in particular, looks like in practice. You will immediately be able to spot that these are skills that qualitative researchers are well-trained in.
UX jobs are positively exploding in number in the US right now. All major tech companies, as well as a host of smaller companies and startups, have opened up a great number of new UX roles, including UX Research. This also means that there are a large number of companies looking specifically for qualitative researchers for these roles. PhD students who specialize in qualitative research may be very well suited to apply for these roles.
Why I wanted to apply for industry internships, and UXR internships in particular:
I joined my PhD program because I love research and I wanted to become a professor eventually. And I have enjoyed my PhD a lot so far. However, I was motivated to apply for tech internships for the following reasons:
- As someone who had never worked outside a university before, I wanted to explore what a non-academic job and its structure felt like before committing to a lifetime in academia. Flexible work too often means working all the time — might I find more free time and freedom in a traditional 9–5?
- As someone interested in researching the tech sector, I wanted to experience it from the inside and see what working at a tech company is like. I felt this would enrich my research perspective in general, and even if I ended up staying in academia.
- I wanted to explore different ways to create impact from research. I have a bit of experience in i) writing papers and popular articles. I also wanted to explore ii) working at big companies to help develop more equitable products and processes, and iii) working with communities at the grassroots level and joining long-term efforts to meet their needs. Pursuing a UXR internship would let me explore the second goal.
- I felt concerned about my adaptability and whether I was becoming hyper-specific or narrow-minded in my approach as an academic — I felt that applying for an industry job, interviewing and working there would help me stay adaptable and expand my skill set.
Part 2: The Application Process — How it Works and What You Need to Do