From Design to Data Science: Comparing Creative and Technical Internships
The variety of tracks offered in Launch gives students the opportunity to work in many different fields, from technical to creative or somewhere in between.
In today’s Launch Spotlight, we’re highlighting two students, Roy Jad, a third-year Computer Science major, and Ryland Leupold, a third-year Biology and Computer Science major. Roy participated in the UX Design Track and interned at Cardboard Live, a company that designs extensions for Twitch streams. Ryland participated in the Data Science Track and interned at the Southern Environmental Law Center, an environmental law group.
Can you tell me a little bit more about your company and what they do?
Roy: Magic the Gathering is a huge trading card game… and it turned virtual. It used to be just physical cards, and then they made a virtual game for it. People started streaming it and millions of people started watching this game online through Twitch. One big problem with this viewing experience was that the cards were pretty small on the screen. So, what Cardboard Live did that kind of revolutionized this industry is it created a Twitch extension which people could just download for free pretty easily, and that would overlay over the stream and it would allow viewers to hover over the cards on the screen and then a pop-up would come up with more details on the card, like an enlarged version of it.
Ryland: SELC is an environmental law group, so they’ll pick certain causes that they want to support and then either file cases against energy companies or against governments that they think are not upholding standards. They basically just raise money and file cases that they think will be successful. Their main focus is on the southeast United States… It’s cool that they’re not nationally-focused. They focus a lot more on the region as opposed to just national issues, and so they’re really focused on the Chesapeake Bay area, and then also coasts because the southeastern United States has a big history with our coastlines and stuff like that.
In a pretty basic explanation, what has your internship consisted of?
Roy: I would be watching these streams, and it was super cool because sometimes my homework was to just watch gaming streams. Same with mountain biking, cooking. Then I would kind of try to put myself in the shoes of someone who would watch this regularly, and then see what they would like to see from the stream. From that, I would just design interfaces for potential extensions that we could create. Then I would present the initial draft designs to Wilson, he would give me tons of feedback, and I would go back and then make improvements. This usually happened a few times before I made a final design for a potential interface, and then I would make a slide deck to accompany that so that we could present it to potential stakeholders.
Ryland: Most of it has just been data analysis, and what I mean by that is, they give me data sets, I look into the data sets, and basically just try to pull out any relevant trends or correlations that I can find. So, for example, the first project that I did for them was an email presentation. I had data about all the different emails that they sent and I basically was just like, ‘What percent of people opened emails from this particular campaign? What was the most successful campaign? How have the trends in your emails exchanged over time?’ I’ve never really worked with actual data before. I know that sounds dumb, but you know in classes or whatever they’ll just give you fake data sets that were just made up by someone. It was pretty cool to actually see the real numbers behind the company and feel like the insights I was gaining for them actually matter.
In what ways did Launch prepare you for your internship?
Roy: I had experience with UX, but I wouldn’t say I had formal UX knowledge, which was the main reason why I joined the Launch program, because UVA doesn’t really offer any formalized education for UX other than like one class in the CS curriculum. To satisfy that, I found the Launch UX design track and I was hoping that I would get a more formal education, sort of like bootcamp-type education, which is exactly what I got. It was three weeks of intensive learning and doing and that’s what I loved about it. It was like 70% doing, 30% learning. It was mostly hands-on. We would learn something in the beginning of the week, and then the rest of the week we’d be working on a project with a small group, three-four people, and we would just be constantly designing. We all came out of it with tons of work that’s portfolio-ready, and you can clearly see people’s progression as designers from week one to week three. I absolutely loved it.
Ryland: I think Launch prepared me pretty well. I didn’t know how to use pandas, like at all, before Launch, but then afterwards I feel very confident. That’s one of the best skills I think I got from that whole training. It was really fun to work with other Data Scientist people, especially because I feel like the training group I was in was pretty diverse in terms of skill sets. A lot of people weren’t as great with coding but they were really good conceptually and on the more statistics side of things they were more knowledgeable, whereas for me, I’m more like a coder as opposed to a steadfast statistician. It was nice to collaborate with people as much as you could over a Zoom call.
Whether you’re interested in working in a technical industry, like Data Science, or something more creative, like UX Design, Launch will connect you to innovative, exciting internships and give you the skills to excel.
Applications for this round of Launch are due October 7th.
