Why I’m doing my masters in Human-Computer Interaction Design at Indiana University
Statement of Purpose for Graduate School
I have known I wanted a career in technology ever since taking Introduction to Informatics my freshman year at Indiana University. During my four years of undergrad at the IU School of Informatics and Computing, I have grown an intense passion for building and designing digital products. I have concentrated on learning technical skills such as HTML, CSS, Ruby on Rails, Python, and SQL. I have applied these technical skills by designing websites and building web applications for mobile phones.
I realized early on in my undergraduate career that in order to apply the skills I was learning in the classroom and online I needed to find real-world projects to work on. I needed to build and create websites for real users and companies. I achieved this goal by doing two things: starting a web design business and doing summer internships.
First, I started a digital agency called Mills Digital with my friend, Jo Fipps. Mills Digital was an LLC that we founded in order to look professional enough to start working for small businesses in the southern Indiana area. It worked. We started getting clients that wanted us to design websites and create videos to advertise their products and businesses. In order to provide more services we brought in a few fellow undergraduate friends looking for real-world experience doing graphic design and videography. Mills Digital was a success. By working with clients and challenging myself to design websites for businesses on a deadline I was able to apply the things I was learning in the classroom and learn even more about web design and how to run a business. The friends I hired were also able to do the same. It was an all around win.
Second, I made it my mission to find a challenging internship every summer during my undergraduate career. I did this in order to learn more about the technology workplace and learn from real professionals in the industries I was interested in. Throughout my four summers I interned at various companies as a business analyst, web developer, product designer, and user experience designer. By doing this every summer I was able to better understand the careers I did and did not want to pursue after graduation. This process enabled me to live in different cities and also to gauge in what kind of community I wanted to make my home one day.
From my experiences in both owning my own web design business and doing summer internships I know I want to be a designer. I want to be a designer in a technology company that is working on complex issues in the world. I want to use technology as a means to solve those problems through designing digital products for the age we live in.
I believe I have the technical skills to be a professional designer. However, through talking to professional designers and taking undergraduate Interaction Design Practice with Professor Marty Siegel, I have realized that I don’t understand how to approach complex problems like a professional designer should be able to do. I haven’t had sufficient experience working with other designers and teammates to work together on difficult problems. I haven’t mastered how to take an idea from paper to a fully tested and usable digital product. I want to better understand people and learn the necessary techniques in order to research how and why humans use technology in the way we do. I want to learn the theories and history behind design. I want to learn how to present my ideas and designs to a large group of people. I want to learn how to be a better communicator both on paper and verbally. I want to learn the frameworks and methods that will help me to design digital products that will change the way people live their lives. These are just some of the many reasons why I have decided to apply for the Human Computer Interaction Masters program at Indiana University Bloomington. I believe having two years immersed in the HCI design program amongst talented designers, professors, and researchers will give me the necessary skills in order to become one of the best designers in the world and help the IU HCI/d program become even more well known on the national level.
