Hi! Introduction to this journey.

Karen Kolb
3 min readApr 23, 2019

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I’m Karen, a curious problem solver who loves a challenge and love to use design thinking as tool. I’m forever curious!

sketching this awesome journey

Since my academical background is in International Relations and Digital Marketing, I can do a good role in understanding different fields, for example related to Communications, Business, Finance, Marketing, Law, etc.

International relations is both a science and an art and provided me with the core knowledge and crucial analytical skills that can help one to make sense of the international system and have an impact on government, business, and society well into the future.

This has helped me to develop a certain understanding of iterations at a macro level. I gained skills in ‘system thinking’ and understanding how a system works.

And I do have the ambition to combine this previous background with things that I love like innovation, technology, digital marketing and design.

I love to build and grow solutions that can make a difference for other people’s lives, to change the way they live for a better sustainable world.

This is the reason I did choose this field as my formal university education. I strive to create digital relations, being a bridge to bring people together online, creating online connections and interactions for them.

I have a special passion for everything digital, I’ve been hustling online for the past years and I’ve become really good at understanding consumers’ online behaviour, driving people from social media platforms to landing pages and websites, making sure that they convert and stay.

I think my best skill is the ability to understand the goals and needs of users as the business goals as well. And from understanding that intersections to be able to design successful connections and solutions.

What I’m doing next?

Put that knowledge and experiences to help businesses achieve grow, design for conversion and growth based on consumer-centric thinking and running data-driven experiments to create strategic value.

I’m very excited to be guided by Iron Hack on how to implement the tools, process and mindset of design on my work.

As a User experience (UX) designer, I strive for creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function. I focus on product design, about the business analysis, user and market research, psychology, strategy, marketing, and even software development, and not only about drawing pretty pixels.

Therefore the idea to join the part-time bootcamp in Amsterdam to learn more about user experience design and skill-up myself seemed to me to be a great opportunity.

I’m very proud to share also that I’m being able to join this journey thanks to Vinted x Iron Hack scholarship program to encourage the emergence of more women talent in the tech industry.

I won a scholarship because my technical interview was described as the best from more than 1.500 applications and I’m so thankful to Iron Hack for giving this opportunity to me and specially for believing in me.

Thanks Iron Hack for making it all possible! I would let you know more about this experience later on another post!

For now, I’m looking forward to April 23th and I’m certain that I have the motivation and skills to successfully commit to this bootcamp, do the work and deliver results.

Looking forward to meet all the people that are part of the Ironhack family and would be sharing this journey together.

Cheers,

Karen.

Find me on LinkdeIn:

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Karen Kolb

🎯 Forever curious! I’m a curious digital creator who loves a challenge and to run experiments. I share here on Medium my stories.