From finger painter to UX Designer, my career journey so far
Ever since I was little I’ve enjoyed art.
As a three-year-old, some of my first memories were of my mom telling me, “this is your last painting, we need to go!” as I smeared finger paint all over paper in my daycare facility. I guess I originally was drawn to art because it allowed me to ‘get my hands dirty’ and create something. I grew to love art, in part because everyone kept saying I was good at it, and let’s be honest, I love attention. All I had to do was draw one portrait and everyone would ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ over my self-taught abilities at a family function? I was sold.
Of course, it wasn’t just the attention that got me hooked on art, though that was a major factor, I also enjoyed experimenting with different mediums, and learning about the effects I could achieve by just changing the medium. Art was something that I could teach myself and learn to excel at, and who doesn’t like to be good at something, especially when everyone around you is encouraging it? I would later go on to give demonstrations on drawing in 4-H and win awards for my work. My work wasn’t particularly original, but I learned how to focus and master different techniques.
As a teenager I became obsessed with music. As someone who had a lot of “angst” as my mother called it, I found it easy to relate to lyrics as the best songwriters could verbalize what I had no words for. I wore my heart on my sleeve because it seemed too big to fit in my chest. I belted the lyrics to my favorite Linkin Park and Skillet songs at the top of my lungs in the minivan I bought from my parents while I cruised home from my job at The Gap. I painted my nails black. I cut my bangs at an angle (yes, really). I went to as many concerts as I could because I could lose myself in the music and for once, feel like I belonged somewhere and was understood. I wrote tormented lyrics in my diary and dreamed of being a singer or rockstar. I even auditioned for singing competitions.
My early career breakthrough came when a local punk rock band that I followed posted via MySpace that they were looking for artists to create t-shirt designs. “I can do that,” I thought. Armed with one of my many large sketchbooks and a host of charcoal pencils, I set out to create the perfect emo t-shirt.
I didn’t get any of my ‘bird and tree silhouette’ sketches on any t-shirts that year (or any year, let’s be real), but I was able to see a career path in which I could be still be involved with music while playing homage to my art interests.
Junior and Senior year of high school I took my academic career down a path called P.S.E.O.( Post Secondary Enrollment Option). This allowed me to take college classes at the local community college (North Hennepin) for free and earn college credit, also counting for high school classes. I set to work earning my A.A. degree in my last two years of high school while putting all my elective courses toward art classes. When I finished the two-year degree program and subsequently graduated high school, I applied for and was accepted into North Hennepin’s Associate of Science in Graphic Design program and spent the next year learning the basics of typography, composition, and the Adobe Creative Suite.
By the time I had finished the design program, I had found a 4-year university with a Bachelor’s program in Music Industry, which was a wonderful combination of music performing, business, and audio technology. I transferred to Minnesota State University Moorhead in the fall of 2010 with once again hopes to work in the music industry.
Over the next four years I double-majored in music and art with a graphic design emphasis. I found my niche creating posters and album artwork for my friends in bands and working as promotions coordinator for the campus activities board. I dabbled in booking campus entertainment, made connections in the entertainment field and even interned at Fargo’s premier music booking agency in summer of 2012. The highlights of that summer included meeting John C. Reilly, getting my dad free tickets to see Creed, and buying groceries for the rock band Halestorm. The lowlights were fetching coffee, doing ‘grunt-work’, and dropping off child support checks on behalf of the agency owner. Also, did I mention this was an unpaid internship?
In the summer of 2013 the small-town girl in me got her first ‘big break’ and view of the outside world when I landed an internship with a college entertainment booking agency in Chicago. I found a furnished apartment via Craigslist to sublet over the summer, packed up my minivan, and drove 8 hours from my hometown in Minnesota to the ‘big city’, armed with a sense of adventure, my determination to succeed, and a fist full of printed-out MapQuest directions.
What happened that summer changed my life. As someone who had lived in small towns all her life and was raised to believe that the natural progression of life included getting married and having kids right out of college, I was suddenly exposed to different possibilities and ways of thinking. In the internship itself, I was underpaid, overworked, and completely taken advantage of. However, I met people I never would have otherwise- all entertainers in their late 20s/early 30s and no one was married or had kids. They were all just living life in the best way they knew how, trying to make money, make people smile and in their own way, contribute to the well-being of society. Chicago itself was a city bustling with excitement and possibilities, and more ‘artist-type’ people than I could shake a paintbrush at. Here, no one was ‘special’ because we all were, in a sense, special, and there was solace in that for which I reveled.
Immediately following graduation in Spring of 2014, I was offered a temp position as a production artist at the on-campus marketing department where I worked part-time throughout the school year. I continued to work there until I received a call from the Chicago entertainment agency where I had interned, asking if I would come back and work full-time as their marketing coordinator. I didn’t have any other employment offers on the table, and I liked the idea of moving back to Chicago, so I took the job.
It was not a great fit, to say the least.
Following my two internships in the industry, my first full-time job in entertainment only served to solidify that this was not the best career field for me to be in. Sensitive, empathetic, heart-on-her-sleeve little 22-year-old me was immediately sucked into the toxicity of an environment where people made a living fully dependent on how much other people ‘liked’ them. Entertainers with fragile egos lashed out at anyone they deemed as a threat or whom did not give them the ‘star treatment’ they thought they deserved. The office where I worked subsequently had air thick with hostility and emotional abuse. Every night I would go home to my tiny, cockroach-infested studio where I struggled to pay rent and cry to myself while the people who were at that point influential in my life would repeat over and over “Stop making a big deal about this,” “Get over yourself,” “These peoples’ attitudes toward you are about them and not you.” But I knew I had to get out.
Turns out there is far more junior graphic designers than there are junior graphic design jobs. After 10 months of applying to multiple jobs with minimal interview requests, I finally worked up the courage to put in my notice with the entertainment agency without another job lined up. I told myself I’d do freelance work, work at a coffee shop or the local grocery store, move into a cheaper apartment with 5 roommates… WHATEVER it took to get me out of that toxic environment. It was that decision where I decided to take my fate in my own hands and reject what I was told in order to do what I knew was right for me personally. And suddenly, things started falling into place. On the last day of that job, I received an offer to work full-time as a graphic designer for a real estate agency. I didn’t think it was the most exhilarating type of job, but the people were nice so I decided to try it out.
It’s amazing how good coworkers can make or break a work environment. I ended up working at the real estate agency for two years. I loved my coworkers, the pay was decent and the benefits and stability were satisfactory. But I quickly got b-o-r-e-d, and I knew it wasn’t my destiny to work with templates creating marketing brochures for multi-million-dollar houses for the rest of my life.
So, the entertainment industry was not for me, and graphic design as a straight-up career seemed dull and hard to scale. What else was I to do? I craved substance and a challenge, and started to look into grad programs as formal education seemed the natural way for me to transition careers.
“UX” was starting to become a more frequently-known buzzword in the design community in 2016 when I was accepted into the Masters of Science program in Human-Computer Interaction at DePaul University in Chicago. Most alumni of the HCI program went on to work in the UX field but the degree program itself was more open-ended: a perfect combination of computer science, psychology, research, and design. It was a wonderful “humans and tech” overview program with the variety that someone like myself who has many interests in many different types of things craved. Moving from graphic design to UX design seemed like a natural transition of careers and with UX I could engage in the depth that I felt print design lacked.
I left my full-time job halfway into the two-year program at DePaul, because I don’t know if anyone has told you this, but working full-time while you’re a full-time grad student is really freaking hard. And I lack the emotional boundaries to simply ‘shut my mind off and do the work.’
I went back to freelancing design work over the summer of 2017 to pay rent, and landed a graduate assistantship on campus in the newly created “makerspace”. This makerspace, dubbed the “Idea Realization Lab” was a wonderful workspace full of 3D printers, screen printing materials, woodshop tools, and more. Like my 3-year-old finger painting self, I was able to roll up my sleeves and ‘get my hands dirty’ while creating events, workshop materials, programming, and space design for the lab. It was a fun job, until I realized it wasn’t financially feasible to have it as my only job. Even though technically the job paid for my tuition, the additional stipend I got as a graduate assistant wouldn’t even pay my rent, and the amount of financial aid I was allowed was capped because I was already receiving “tuition assistance”. With an assistantship you’re expected to have that as your only job outside of class, but the reality is, it’s not financially feasible unless you also have someone paying your living costs or are living with your parents. Have we discussed yet about how unpaid internships and assistantships are inherently classist? Anyway, I had no choice but to look for full-time work again.
It took me six months from when I first started interviewing with recruiters for UX jobs to when I landed my first contract position. I worked with A LOT of recruiters who didn’t understand what UX was, who took hours of my time and then ‘ghosted’, and one who sent me to interview for a job that I was incredibly under-qualified for, consequently had the worst interview of my life, and then was blacklisted by the Fortune 500 company. I had very few ‘hits’ for my multiple career ‘misses’.
However, all it takes is one person to give you a chance.
I finally stumbled upon the Brooksource talent agency after a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. This agency actually understood my profession and my background, and submitted me to interview for a job that was finally a fantastic fit for my skill set. I worked as a contract junior UX/UI Designer for United Healthcare for a few months while finishing my master’s degree and then landed a permanent role with Relativity, a software company in downtown Chicago.
I now work at the PetSmart corporate office in Phoenix, Arizona. I know my journey as a UX designer is far from over, and I have found myself constantly in a position of educating the companies that hired me as to what UX actually is and the value of it. Evangelization and advocating have been as much of my job description as a UX designer as prototyping and user research, if not more so. The field of UX relatively new, is constantly growing and companies often struggle to adapt to its practices. My experiences in this field, though not always positive, have been a fascinating ride and one that I’m not sure I’ll ever become ‘bored’ of. Plus, advocating for the needs of users in the products you’re designing is a worthy cause that I can get behind.
UX is a career field in which you have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, talking to consumers, advocating for consumers, and problem-solving in ways that go beyond pushing pixels on a screen. My sensitivity and empathy are key values in this industry, serving as strengths instead of being seen as weaknesses.
I’ve always been told that emotions make you weak and are a negative thing with no place in the workplace, while in reality emotions themselves are wonderful biological suggestions that can inform, motivate, and empower.
Emotions make us human and UX is about designing for human experience. Emotions do in fact belong in the workplace and in every place in our lives.
Becoming a UX designer has been a journey which I have in turn become more of myself. While I was once told to shrink certain parts of myself, UX has taught me to expand them and delve deeper to understand human nature. UX is a field which, at the risk of sounding cliché, has taught me it’s ok to be myself. It’s been a long journey to find where I am, but I’m happy I’m here.
