How They Did It | Stephanie’s Transition From Biology To Tech
This is a summary that accompanies the original interview published on Work In Progress Podcast. Here we highlight our favorite parts from this conversation and some useful resources at the end of the article. Listen to the full interview here.
And I just thought “Why not try taking [this] path, even just to try it? If it doesn’t work out, I can take this other path I know what the end result is”. I feel like that gave me more confidence in making a change.
— Stephanie Sakamoto
Stephanie is currently going through a bootcamp
She is enrolled in General Assembly in San Francisco. At the time of our interview, Stephanie was in the middle of her bootcamp and said that she was trying to find a better work life balance due to the demanding schedule. However, the first hurdle was having to get used to not having a job.
Tell me about your past experiences
After Stephanie got her undergraduate degree in biology, she wanted to do something different so she taught English in Japan. Due to an accident and a surgery, her passion for medicine and desire to help people was re-invigorated (she thought about becoming a doctor when she was younger but didn’t pursue it). Upon returning to the U.S., Stephanie realized that she was more interested in the business side of medicine so she chose the Masters of Business and Science program at Keck Graduate Institute. After obtaining the Masters Degree she worked at a biotech company in the Bay Area, where she spent the next four years in the Regulatory Affairs group. She participated in a rotational program within the Regulatory Affairs group where she spent 6 months each at Compliance, Manufacturing, Project Management, and Strategy departments; then she worked in the Labeling Group within Regulatory Affairs to produce the labels on medicine bottles for physicians and customers.
Tell me about your role at the Labeling Group
She wrote the labels found on medicine bottles that provide information such as dosage, intended use and safety information. Stephanie said there was a lot of writing in Microsoft Word (entering information, adding new data) and cross-functional collaboration (with clinicians, biostatisticians, clinical pharmacologists, etc). She had to communicate and understand people from diverse backgrounds and translate their knowledge into clear and concise information for customers.
However, she wished that she was able to impact people’s lives more directly. She is an empathic person and is very attuned to people’s feelings; working on the documentation meant that she was far from interacting with people who read the labels and thus making it hard to see the impact of her work. Some days she went home feeling like she didn’t make a difference in anyone’s life. On top of that, she preferred working with people face to face. After considering it for a long period of time, she decided the job wasn’t something she wanted to do for the long term.
Tell me about your transition
At around the same time, a friend encouraged Stephanie to participate in usability studies at Google, where Google evaluates products by testing them with users. She tried the product and talked to researchers, answered questions and asked them questions. She found the experience to be interesting and felt that there would be opportunities to work in healthcare if she switched to this role. She decided to learn more about the field and eventually signed up for User Experience Design Immersive at General Assembly.
The decision took quite a while to make. Her scares were thoughts like “I had worked so hard in a certain path”, “Am I taking a step back?”, “What am I sacrificing to make this change?”, “How will people view me? I am someone in her 30s and making this change into a designer role.” But when she asked herself: “Where do I see myself in 10 years?” She thought that if she stayed, she would probably be great at what she did but may also be unhappy. She concluded that she could always fall back on her original track if she changed her mind.
When it came to bootcamp, Stephanie was worried about practical things like not having health insurance and if she had unexpected spending that she couldn’t cover. She mentioned if she was younger she would have jumped right in instead of mulling over it for so long. Being in her 30s, she is more risk averse than her younger self. In fact, she took longer than most people to get into a bootcamp because she wanted to make sure she had enough money saved up and be able to support herself through not working for over 6 months and possibly longer. She first considered the bootcamp at the end of 2017 and she started the bootcamp in summer 2019.
When she got into the bootcamp she met people like her who wanted to make career changes and she realized that she wasn’t the only one making the change.
What is UI/UX
UI/UX designer roles are not as code intensive; they primarily work in conjunction with developers although it is useful to have the coding knowledge and language to communicate with developers.
Stephanie’s program is strictly about design. She thinks about how to design functional, enjoyable and intuitive experiences for users
She might need to choose a discipline/specialty later in her career, for example:
- Research: speaking to users and understand their perspective and inform how a design might look
- Visual design: design the interface, typography, color theory, layout
- Creative concepting: thinking about ideas and solutions to solve problem
- UX writer: focus on content strategy, how to frame information
Resources
- User Experience Design Immersive: SF
- Usability studies at Google
- Masters of Business and Science program at Keck Graduate Institute
Lessons we learned from Stephanie
- Take the time to prepare for bootcamp/transition: have enough funds to support yourself through the day to day but also for rainy days like health insurance or unexpected spendings.
- She quit her job cold turkey. She recommends doing things in the background while keeping your job, start the change earlier, or do part-time courses while working at the job
