Member-only story
How I became a UX researcher
Highlighting transferable work from my previous roles wasn’t enough— I had to shed who I was to embrace what I had become.
A missed opportunity
I took my first anthropology class as a freshman in college, and I was immediately smitten. I had always been people curious — interested in learning about different cultures, how people lived, how their traditions evolved, and how all of that influenced their identity today. However, in 1999, majoring in Anthropology didn’t seem to offer a lot of career options. When I told my parents about my newfound passion, they were concerned I’d be sentenced to a life in academia or out on an archaeological dig, neither of which was the life they had dreamed for me. And to be honest, it wasn’t the life I had longed for myself.
Instead, I majored in Economics, minored in Accounting, and found myself in the workforce a quick three years later. Time passed: I got my MBA, focused my career on brand marketing, and found my first job post business school at Proctor & Gamble, where I was responsible for re-inventing the customer experience for hair color customers. I had my first taste of applied research by participating in an ethnography during this job.