Empathetic & bold creative with a big heart and a learning mindset.
It started with a floorplan
My first love in design was architecture. My dad took me to an open house of a recently-built two-story home in our suburban neighborhood, and I became obsessed with the marriage of form and function. I took home the floor plan, and soon started drawing my own. I loved the open-ended creativity of imagining a home, who would live in it, and what needs of theirs would shape the home’s design.
In high school, when I wasn’t on the basketball court or the softball field, I was getting lost in some new creative hobby. I wrote poems and short stories, bought my first DSLR (Nikon D3000 – I still have it!), and took product engineering classes that sparked a deep appreciation for applied design. While I waited for my two older brothers to finish football practice, I kept myself busy playing around on Photoshop, which escalated into creating fake flyers and graphics. Without knowing it, I was teaching myself graphic design.
A graphic designer is born
When it was time to look for an on-campus job in college, my eyes glazed over at the idea of swiping ID cards at the gym or manning the library front desk. So I put together a portfolio of my fledgling Photoshop designs, and landed a job as a graphic designer for the student affairs marketing department. For the remainder of my four years in college, I honed my design skills working in that agency-style studio, eventually becoming a design supervisor mentoring junior designers.
Although I was completely and utterly in love with graphic design at this point, I got a full-time offer for a rotational product marketing program at Facebook that I just couldn’t resist. So I relegated design to side-hustle status, doing freelance projects for small businesses, non-profits, friends, and family in my spare time away from the bustle of tech.
Returning home to design
After three years working as a product marketing manager on a variety of Facebook/Meta products, I felt design tugging at my heartstrings again. As a marketing manager, you work with a lot of creatives, but don’t actually get to do the creating very often. I was working with product designers, producers, content designers, advertising agencies, graphic designers, motion designers, you name it. But I wanted to get my hands dirty.
So I made the difficult decision to make a career change and pursue a full-time career in UX/UI design. I quickly realized it was my calling. Every passion, skill, and experience I’d honed over time seemed to fit perfectly with UX/UI design. After working tirelessly to gain experience and build my portfolio, I accepted a full-time Product Design offer for Meta’s Reality Labs team. I picked up and moved to Los Angeles, and started a new life as a designer shaping the future of the metaverse.