Life as a Center Centre Student
I’m a student at Center Centre, the user experience (UX) design school creating the next generation of UX designers. What makes Center Centre different than other schools is how they designed the education and culture.
The school operates more like a work environment than a classroom. We come to school five days a week from 9PM — 5PM to learn new skills and work on real-world projects, just like we would at a job. During our time here, we focus on learning 24 core skills needed to be a UX designer over the course of two years.
Learn Course Material From Industry Experts
Every three weeks, we learn a new course from an industry expert in a two-day workshop. Industry experts are professionals who are known for their experience with the course material. We’ve learned skills like coding HTML and CSS from Seun Erinle to presentation techniques from Mike Monteiro and user research practices from Dana Chisnell. The courses focus on teaching us both technical and interpersonal skills that make a well-rounded UX designer.
We spend two days with the expert learning skills we need and practicing how to do them. Learning these skills from industry experts helps us to have the current skills and practices companies need from UX designers.
After we finish learning what we need to know from the expert, we spend the rest of the week practicing what we learned.
Project-Based Learning
Center Centre’s education is unique in how they grade performance. At a traditional school, people receive letter grades based on the work they complete. Here, we take what we learn and apply it to projects. This is to demonstrate that we know how to use the skills we’re learning.
We complete competencies for each course to provide evidence we understand how to apply the skill. This type of learning substitutes having us take tests and exams to show what we know.
To pass a course, we complete the number of competencies for that course. Each competency comes with a number of achievements we need to complete.
These achievements are broken up into four levels: developing, emerging, proficient, and distinguished. These levels help us to progress at a steady pace and demonstrate we’re competent in the skills we’re learning.
Here’s what each level covers:
- Developing: We demonstrate what we learned by explaining the concepts and practices of the skills. This helps to reinforce what we learned and demonstrate that we understand the material.
- Emerging: We apply what we know to practice projects. This helps us to show we’re competent in the techniques and know how to apply them to project work.
- Proficient: We apply what we learned to a real-world project. This allows us to apply what we know in the context of a project as a user experience designer.
- Distinguished: We take what we learned and teach someone else how to do it or apply something we learned that wasn’t taught in the course. This allows us to go above and beyond what we’ve learned. This shows that we’re advanced enough in the skill to help others learn.
After spending two days with an industry expert, we dedicate the next three days to demonstrating what we learned in developing and emerging. This helps us to better retain what we learn and make mistakes early. Making mistakes early helps us to learn how we can approach our work better in the future before we apply it to a real-world project.
Real-World Projects
After week one of a course is done, we apply what we know to real-world projects for two weeks before starting a new course. Real-world projects are client-based projects contracted by the school for us to apply our design skills. They last a few months and give us the real-world experience that companies look for when hiring new designers.
We work as a team on projects from start to finish, going through the entire design process. We interview stakeholders and conduct research with users to define the problem we’re trying to
We work together to facilitate meetings and activities, sketch and prototype interactions, and recruit people to validate our ideas.
Networking Events
Center Centre provides many opportunities to meet contacts within the industry. We eat lunch and exchange conversation with industry experts. We visit companies to learn from UX designers in the field. We even hold events at the school that bring in UX designers from all over the world. We get to build relationships with these professionals while they’re at the school.
Exposure to so many working UX designers helps us prepare for our career. Through conversations, we see how our education will fit into the field of user experience as a whole.
Daily Stand-Up & Reflections
In the tech field, it’s common for teams to do what’s called a Daily Stand Up. Team members meet to talk about what they accomplished since the last time they met and what they plan to accomplish by the next meeting. We do Daily Stand Ups as a way of keeping each other informed of our progress.
During this time, we like to share something we’ve learned since we last met. This can be anything from reflecting on an experience we had or a new approach to doing our work. We call this our daily learning and it’s unique to the culture and education at Center Centre. We do this to encourage an environment of continuous learning.
Another thing we like to do every day is an end-of-day reflection. We gather as a team and reflect on what we did that day. We ask questions like “what went well?” or “what will I change?” We can also discuss things we’re unclear about or struggling with.
This helps us to think about how we might change the way we approach our work in the future.
One-on-one’s
Every week, each of us has a one-on-one session with a facilitator (faculty member). This provides us the opportunity to talk about anything we’re working on or things we’re struggling with. We receive feedback on our progress and discuss things we can do to improve our work.
Center Centre’s culture encourages continuous communication and feedback.
Interested in Being a Student?
Before Center Centre, I only knew what user experience design was about. Now, I have a wide array of both technical and interpersonal skills that will help me in becoming a proficient UX designer. Every day at Center Centre is a new experience. I always look forward to coming to school to learn and experience something new.
If you’re creative, always finding better ways to do things, or someone who just loves to solve problems, user experience might be right for you. Check out the Center Centre website and apply to be a student.
If you’re not ready to go back to school, help us fill the world with industry-ready UX designers by donating to the Center Centre Give Forward Student Loan Fund. All the proceeds go to tuition costs which helps future students attend Center Centre. Any amount helps! Thank you!
