<aside> 🌟 Kate is a recent CMU grad working at Microsoft designing new products and user experiences. Kate graduated with a degree in IS and HCI and a minor in Business. Outside of Microsoft, you can find Kate hiking and climbing through Seattle's natural beauty!
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My official title is a Designer, but I think they’re making the switch to calling it a Product Designer. I’m on the Multimedia Design Team, and I’m honestly still trying to feel out my role, because I started two weeks ago and my team has been going through a lot of reorganization. Right now I’m doing more visual design than I had expected, but this is fine, because I still want to work on those skills.
Right now we are introducing a new service, so I’m working on the landing page of that service. In my work, I’ve been thinking a lot about the user flow of the service. For example, I need to think about how one screen leads into the next or how people might get to a certain screen. It can be tricky because my work is separate from the rest of the experience. On one hand we want to make the service distinct, but on the other we want to make sure the experience is cohesive. This is an example of having to think about how a service fits into an overall ecosystem. Additionally, I’ve been working with Marketing to think about the visual design and branding as well as to create a framework that will support the rest of the team as we continue to build out the service.
🥰 One thing that’s been really nice is that my mentor from my internship last summer still works here. That’s something I really recommend to anyone in any industry: find a mentor. We’ve set up weekly calls, and she’s been helping me a lot with the whole process of my new role and being super supportive. That’s why I would really recommend finding a mentor because they’re someone who knows the industry, company, and culture, and they can answer any questions you might have.
😥 In terms of challenge, it’s been a little tricky as my team is a bit smaller and not a lot of people come into the office every day. Because I’m just starting, it’s a little harder to feel connected to the company when I don’t interact with many people on a day-to-day basis.
Working at Microsoft has been a lot different than CMU because CMU focuses a lot on process and the theory of human-centric design while Microsoft combines a lot of things and considers how everything fits into the ecosystem of a product. Since I’m working on professional products, visual design and problem solving are very important as you want to produce professional-looking products. It's been a little overwhelming because this is my second week here, and I was put on a project right away. Through my project, I'm still figuring out what the team needs and what my role is.
During the summer after my first year, I didn’t have anything lined up right away. I started applying to all different kinds of places like startups and industries outside of my major because I wanted to get more experience designing. I feel that any project or anything that you do can help teach you new things and create something you can put on your portfolio. I’d really suggest starting a portfolio. It doesn’t matter what you do; I think any experience is good. Designers come from all over the place, and your different experiences make you a unique designer.
So I applied to a lot of different places during my first summer but didn’t get an official internship. While at home, I took on a lot of personal projects. For these projects, I would think about a problem I saw in the world and go through the design process. I would then mock up ideas and different solutions. I also went online to look for mentorships and apprenticeships and ended up working as an unpaid apprentice for an educational technology start-up. During that summer, I ended up doing a lot of smaller projects that got me thinking about different problems and solutions. I really liked working on a lot of different things because I was able to see what I like and what I don’t like. I think that’s what an internship is for. Gaining experience is important so you can find what you do and don’t like. So you should really go for anything you’re interested in. Think about the problem, see if you can come up with a solution, and then make it into your reality! Get involved anywhere you can. It doesn’t have to be big; it just has to get you out there and thinking about problems and solutions.
A lot of what I’m interested in is educational technology, because I feel like that sector never really made the leap into technology — it kind of got left behind. I think it’s really interesting because education is probably the most influential thing in a young child’s development, and yet the technology aspect is lacking. There have been a lot of efforts to combine education and technology, but it’s never really taken off. You can’t just add technology into education. You have to think about the whole system and process as well as how you’re going to educate teachers on any new technology.
The interview for my Microsoft internship last summer was a portfolio walk-through. I covered two projects that I picked out. Then I had four one-on-one back-to-back interviews. So the whole interview was about five hours, which was exhausting! I got a return offer after my internship, so I didn’t have to interview for the role I have now.
For design interviews, pick a project that really shows your talents and strengths. Also, make sure to explain your thinking. I feel like the worst thing you can do is to introduce a problem and show your solution without explaining how you got there. Everything about design is really having a reason and explanation for things. Anyone can make something look pretty, but not everyone can create a solution that considers all of the user and business needs.