Student Spotlights: UX vs Data Science
In honor of Forge’s upcoming showcase, we wanted to reach out to a couple of students and highlight them along with their amazing work! Reminder: tomorrow November 19th the showcase page goes live, and voting opens. Students are welcome and encouraged to share their projects with friends/family to vote! Then, on November 24th, showcase voting closes. The overall winner will receive a $100 grit gift card total for group + forge shirt & stickers and the runner up(s) will receive a $15 grit card for each group member + forge shirt & stickers!
This semester, Marina Gianakopoulos took Forge’s course on User Experience design called Wireframe where students learn to design beautiful websites and apps. Taylor Barmak, on the other hand, took Node Pro where students learn the basics of data science by analyzing and visualizing data in Python. We asked them a few questions about their experience, and we hope you enjoy getting to know a bit about Marina and Taylor as well as their works as much as we did!
What is your favorite thing about the course?
Marina (UX): My favorite thing about the Wireframe course has been learning about a new field and new software. I was curious about UX design, however, UVA doesn’t have any classes in it so I was excited to find this class.
Taylor (Data Science): I just love data science so it was exciting to learn more about it.
What was the inspiration behind your project?
Marina (UX): My project was the design of a mobile site for Charlottesville Guide which is a site run by a member in my group. We decided to do the design for this site as one of the stakeholders was in our group and our recommendations could actually be implemented.
Taylor (Data Science): My final project used election day tweets from 2016. I was inspired by the 2020 election happening around the same time and I wanted to use text analysis as part of the project.
What is your project about?
Marina (UX): The site helps people stay up to date with things to do in Charlottesville, helping visitors navigate the city to find restaurants, shopping, experiences, and even lodging. In our mobile site design, we worked on making the site simpler, more intuitive, and adding local credibility.
Taylor (Data Science): My project is about using machine learning to classify tweets as coming from verified or non-verified twitter users. https://nodepro-projects.hackcville.com/team6/
Favorite skills that you’ve learned/most important skills?
Marina (UX): My favorite take away from Wireframe was learning about different design principles and how to appeal to users. I think the psychology behind UX design is very interesting.
Taylor (Data Science): My favorite skills are the text analysis and Natural Language Processing skills. I enjoyed using sentiment analysis tools.
How will you use your skills that you’ve learned in the future?
Marina (UX): I think the skills I’ve learned from this course are not just specific to UX design but are applicable to many design fields, and I think I will be able to leverage what I’ve learned in whatever profession I decide to go into.
Taylor (Data Science): I’m not really sure how I want to use it in the future. If I find a cool dataset I might do a personal project, and I’m interested in doing a career in Data Science so the skills will be useful there.
What’s your journey in Forge and your overall experience been like?
Marina (UX): My overall experience with Forge was really good. The curriculum was taught in an efficient way and provided me with a skillset and knowledge I can’t say I had before taking the class.
Taylor (Data Science): Forge has overall been fantastic. I’ve taken a course all five of my semesters here and I was just accepted to be a Node PC next semester so I am excited to give back to Forge which has given me so much. I started with Hustle (Entrepreneurship), then took Node, then Source, then then Wireframe, and this semester I took Node Pro. The Node courses and Source were definitely my favorites. I love to code.
Favorite moment in class?
Marina (UX): My favorite moment in class was creating user personas. Knowing your user or users is a huge driver behind the design of a product and I find myself particularly drawn to human-centered design.
Taylor (Data Science): I don’t think there was a specific memorable moment in class. It was fun to watch everyone give their final project presentations, though.
Why did you decide to take your skills course?
Marina (UX): I decided to take Wireframe as I am very interested in design and wanted to take a design course outside of the School of Architecture. Design courses are limited at UVA, so I’m glad I had the opportunity to take this course.
Taylor (Data Science): I took the course because I enjoyed Node and I wanted to learn more about Data Science. Node Pro was the best way to do that.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Marina (UX): In my free time I like to run and try out different trails. I also love going to new restaurants.
Taylor (Data Science): In my free time I like to swim, read books, and hang with friends.
