Humans of Scout

The colorful intersection of empathy, identity, and design…part 2!

By Nora Holland

Life as a college student can be overwhelming. As undergraduates, we are all constantly completing coursework, applying for jobs, participating in clubs and events, and worrying about life after graduation. We are constantly working towards the future without really knowing what may be in store. The semesters are incredibly fast-paced, especially for the Scout community as we work with brands, design content, and collaborate with one another.

However, as hard as we work, Scout is not just an organization; it’s a whole family of passionate, creative people that love what they do. Each and every Scout human has a different inspiring story of their passions, their challenges, and how they got to where they are today. We were inspired by the Humans of New York to showcase some of our community members and take a deeper dive into their experiences. Come meet some of Scout and learn about their journey to design their favorite things, and what they want to do after leaving Northeastern.

Hulda Zheng

Hulda is a fourth-year studying Business with a concentration in marketing and Experience/Interaction Design from New York. At first, she did not see herself being able to pursue a career in art, but eventually she realized her passion for UX and how she could explore the intersection between design and marketing.

“My first co-op was a web and creative marketing co-op and I thought that was literally a perfect split of my two interests/majors and I told myself I was going to learn a lot in those six months; and what I learned is that I love UX.

All of my effort after that was put into trying to get a UX design co-op. I interviewed for all these co-ops but at Bose, there was no portfolio run-through or people judging my design. Instead, it was a 30-minute call with my manager and one of my mentors, and they just asked me about my interests. I told them all about my love for traveling and learning filmmaking and all this unrelated stuff! They told me about the position in Bose Labs where they come up with all their ideas for products coming out five to ten years from now, and I just thought: sitting here and coming up with ideas for six months? Sign me up! And somehow I got the job; I think our values just aligned and they saw how passionate I was about it.

I got to learn about design thinking and the whole process of working with people from different disciplines, and that kind of leads me to now! This whole year I’ve been in E-club [Entrepreneurs Club] and Scout thinking about what kind of place I want to work at after graduation, and I switched to Labs because its all about design thinking and how design is related to your life as a person and community member.

So, right now I just got a job offer last week to work at this start-up as a creative director! It’s a CRM for university entrepreneurial ecosystems which is like Mosaic, Scout, E-club… everything I’ve been working on this year. Being able to find a company whose mission I align with while working on the business, marketing, design and UX…that freedom is something I really value.”

Alex Renaud

Alex is a third-year studying Environmental Engineering and Landscape Architecture from North Shore, Massachusetts. Growing up surrounded by beaches and mountains, the environment has always been a huge part of his life which inspired him to pursue engineering in college.

“I really liked engineering and I saw the practicality it, but I quickly found that I was lacking a creative outlet in terms of interacting with the environment and our natural systems in a way that can be beneficial to both the environment and society. That’s why I jumped into a combined major with landscape architecture as a way to design with living systems, and think about not just from the resources you can extract from it (which is the engineering perspective) but doing that in a way that is beneficial to the environment and is a place that people would want to be.

I am really happy I did it because I definitely want to serve my future career in a way where I can help the relationship between people and the environment, especially in urban places where people are often so disconnected. I think there is a way we can introduce natural systems so that you can decrease climate change and save water and do all these wonderful things with the environment but also reconnect people back to nature and the local ecosystems and biodiversity.”

Kat Minor

Kat is a third-year studying Interaction Design with minors in Computer Science and Game Design from Louisville, Kentucky. Kat first discovered her love for design through a middle school project on endangered species, where they spent hours designing their presentation before they even knew what graphic design was. Eventually, PowerPoint presentations led to a co-op as a User Interface Artist at Playstation.

“I had a motto in high school that was essentially if something that someone else does makes you jealous, you need to ask how them how they do it and then do it yourself. This worked out really well for me because I think I learned from some of the best designers among my peers on how to design.

At this time in high school, I was really self conscious of who I was as a person. I was very interested in games, specifically JRPGs, and this type of music called Vocaloid that uses animated music videos. I took a lot of inspiration from Vocaloid music videos, but when people would ask me “Kat what’s your favorite kind of music?” I would say “oh, I don’t like music.” I was just not interested in telling people what I was interested in.

Senior year, one of my favorite teachers always talked to me about what I wanted to do with my life, but I was still insecure and thought I could never make it in graphic design. She said, “I can’t wait for five years when I see Kathryn and she’s working at some big game company,” and I had never thought about that. Hearing that from her took a while to process because I had never expressed that interest to her. Moving into college, she was really the one that inspired me to decide that I wanted to take the games classes here.”

Ava Nordling

Ava is a third-year Experience Design major from San Francisco, California. Most of her passions, interests, and participation in Scout come down to one question: where do we feel safe and seen?

“I first became interested in design in high school. I became really curious about the things that go into this process and that interested me because I knew I liked art and being creative but I never felt like I wanted to be the one to dedicate all the time to make a refined visual piece; instead I really liked being a part of the conceptual process. In all points of my academic career I was seeking out teachers of color, teachers who slow down and really value more subversive schools of thought like queer theory and critical race theory, so on my resume I specified that I specialized in race and gender theory. I spent a lot of my personal time studying that; I took some law classes around gender and a journalism class… overall I think I am a generalist, as many designers are.

In the future, I hope to continue working in the civic design space. I think it’s really interesting how when you’re redesigning a government experience, such the space where people sign up for a vaccine, you have to be compliant and accessible and offer things in multiple languages. I really like this space because whatever I am working on will reach a lot of people and it has to be usable because people are depending on it so I just have fallen in love with this little specific niche area. I’m also really inspired by podcasts; in the future I think I could use my experience from Scout because I feel like I have the support I need to start more freelancing. I think I can discover those things that are purposely hidden from career paths through the Scout channel.”