“Be curious. Ask as many questions as you can. Explore. That enhances creativity and makes you a better designer.”

This was one of the many quotes I heard at a recent design talk and it’s definitely not a new idea —we designers tend to flood the room with questions at professional design critiques as well as informal chats about UX (meet ups, design events, interviews etc).

While the underlying principle behind the quote is solid, I didn’t necessarily agree with one part: ‘Ask as many questions as you can’.

Say whaaat!? That seems like a contradiction to being a designer, doesn’t it? After all, it’s the essence of our role —problems arise, we question why it arises, problems are understood, we question how do we solve them, we provide a solution, and we question how to improve it and repeat! …

Raise your hands if this has happened to you — You decide to brighten up your UX portfolio for one of many reasons, usually before you start job searching. You spend weeks (sometimes, months) revamping and redesigning your work until voila! The day comes when you’re happy with what you have done and you start showcasing your hard work in your brand new portfolio!

But, uh oh! You’re not getting the responses that you expected — What happened, you wonder? My portfolio should work on paper: It has the projects I’m most proud of, it talks about my process in detail and there’s a little bit of branding as well. …

Congratulations, you new college grad — You’ve just landed your first swanky job or internship at a fantastic company as a UX Researcher/Specialist! It’s a feeling of relief, happiness and excitement. You walk through the door on that first day, starry-eyed and hopeful. You get your first project and the nerves start to kick in.

You start thinking, “What do I do now? I’ve only done UX at school — This isn’t school!”. Well, fear not. …

Ah, job searching. The supposed baby step that’s actually a giant leap into the world of adulthood. All of us have opinions about it, none of them are neutral. A while ago, I noticed that most of my fellow junior designers don’t exactly find this process very user-friendly. In fact, to quote Coldplay, their most frequent complaint was ‘No one ever said it would be this hard’.

That’s when I realized that my experiences interviewing for (and getting rejected) by 100 companies could actually be useful for my fellow peers. I’ve interviewed for almost every possible junior UX position at different companies; from giants like Yelp and Facebook to family-and-friends funded start ups with three people. I can say for certain that this period will teach you a LOT about yourself. And relax, this isn’t going to be a rant about how annoying the job search is or what to do in a UX interview. This article is meant to mentally prepare you, an incredibly talented junior UXer, for what’s out there from the perspective of someone who is still facing these hurdles everyday. Hopefully, what you read will make your giant leap a little less terrifying. …