<aside> 🌟 Eric Zhao is a senior majoring in Environments Design. This summer, Eric is working at Meta as a conversational design intern.

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🌟 How would you describe your current job in one to two sentences?

I am doing multimodal interaction design for VR.

🌟 Do you think there were any specific classes that helped you garner the skills you need for this job? If so, which classes?

Interaction design overview — one of the projects was a conversational interface. And it was a very relevant project when I interviewed for the internship.

🌟 Is there any class that’s helped you grow generally the most as a designer?

I took Environments Studio with Dina El-Zanfaly in my junior year. This is also a required studio class for design majors. It was a class where we started having more autonomy in the projects we created. That freedom was great for me to express skills in Arduino and physical making.

🌟 Do you think your job is inspiring the direction of the rest of your academic time?

No. But I’m saying that because before I got to my current job, I already knew I wanted to work with AR/VR/XR, and this job has strengthened that interest — but hasn’t really changed it.

🌟 What is your advice on classes and building a design portfolio? Which would you say is a “better idea”: knowing the type of work you want to do and picking classes based on that, or taking classes and discovering/picking jobs based on the work you made?

I would say to have some idea of what you want as a job, but to keep your mind open and see if it changes.