They’re some of my favourite meetings since we get to bounce ideas off of each other and the team is just a fun and brilliant crew to hang out with in these contexts. The Paper design team has design sessions twice a week where we brainstorm and review work together. I sit next to the engineers on my team, so I usually try and check in with them at some point in the day, understand where they are and whether or not they need design guidance with anything they’re working on. I generally hate waking up early, but love being at the office while it’s quiet, so I try to get in around 8:30–9:00am, grab a coffee and eat breakfast at my desk.Įvery day is sort of different, so I check my calendar and make sure I block off at least a few hours to put headphones on and think. My long-running favourites are Hidden Brain, Death, Sex and Money, and Radiolab. I bike to work and usually listen to a podcast on the way. Once I realized that there was an actual job that aligned with my broad set of interests (art, engineering, business, psychology), all I wanted to do was find ways to be better at it.įrom there, I spent the majority of my time outside of engineering school reading to understand design principles and theories, and paired that with actually practicing it-going to hackathons, freelancing for startups, and running a design club at Waterloo. Through these internships, I experimented with working as a software engineer but ultimately discovered what a “UX designer” was by working alongside them in tech companies.

Luckily, I went to the University of Waterloo which requires most students to do a series of 6 internships as a degree requirement. I just knew that I liked both visual art and the sciences and that I wanted to be challenged.

I didn’t too think hard about my career outcomes at this point. I started out studying urban planning, but halfway through, I got bored and started over in a systems engineering program. My time in college was kind of all over the place. I started making websites as a kid - Neopets store themes, Myspace profiles, and Piczo sites, but I never realized any of this could amount to any sort of paying job.

Dropbox careers illustrator