Bringing strong focus to my career and fun to the rest—because success is best when you’re smiling

Career Path

My Journey Through Tech and Design

Left Brain Talent

My technical interest stemmed from my Bachelor’s Degree at Indiana University Bloomington from The School of Informatics & Computing. This degree led me to my current career path in the IT industry. In July 2016 I was placed as a Performance Engineer for General Motors. This job was to ensure several applications’ quality and environment stability.

After exposure to many of the company’s job titles, I picked up a more artistic role as a UX/UI Designer. I began working closely with developers. Watching their daily tasks encouraged me to take HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Angular courses in hopes of becoming an exceptional designer one day. I knew the role of front-end development was not for me, but I also knew I needed to know enough about the obstacles developers tackle when coding my designs.

With practice and attendance of code training sessions from experienced developers on my team, as well as taking Udemy courses online, I became a front-end developer driven by user centered design. For me, the enjoyment of being a front-end developer and a UX/UI Designer is to take conceptual wireframes and transform them into a functional application

— Essentially, making my ideas come to life.

I now take technical requirements given by my client and extract them into a visual user flow and an appealing interface. Using both the technical side of the brain, and the creative side.

    • Figma

    • Sketch

    • Miro

    • Invision

    • Adobe XD

    • Adobe Illustrator

    • Photoshop

    • Workshopping Project Kickoffs

    • User Personas

    • User Research

    • User Empathy

    • Usability Testing

    • Empathy Maps

    • Cross Functional Collaboration

    • Clickable Prototyping

    • Wireframes

    • High Fidelity Designs

    • Demo Walkthroughs to Clients

    • Alignment with Stakeholders

    • Lead Design Reviews

    • Quick Delivery in Agile Environments

    • HTML/CSS

    • Angular

    • Font-End Development

    • Technical Architectural Diagrams

    • Performance Engineering

    • Jira

    • Agile Collaboration

    • Accessibility Standards

    • Research

    • Data Analysis

    • Heuristic Evaluation

    • Task Flow Diagrams

Right Brain Talent

My interest in art has taken me in a path of creativity that has led my career to become a creative designer.

In the past, I have take a variety of art classes including 3D Art, 2D Art, Photography |, Photography ||, Sculpting, etc.

I then minored in the School of Media, which inspired me to apply my artistic abilities to my videography assignments, which led me to a hobby in photography and videography.

For a few years after graduation, I continued my pursuit in videography through freelance projects. For example, I had friends who wanted to promote start ups, and I would put together clips for their marketing. Again, applying my artistic abilities.

My current role as a UX/UI designer is an artistic role os the perfect balance of creativity and technicality. It consists of understanding requests from the business users, then designing several iterations. This may mean coming up with a user flow from scratch, block framing, building wireframes, high fidelity compositions, and clickable prototypes. Or this may mean tweaking an existing user experience/UI to provide a more accessible and seamless interface.

Either way, I think it is no coincidence that I ended up in the IT industry with not much confidence on my technical expertise (even given my bachelors degree), but then found the creative path I was always meant for — while still within a technical realm of familiarity.