In undergrad I got the opportunity to study Business Technology and Business Analytics Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), which helped me understand the business side of strategy. However, I took a course where we were working on implementing a new business area for a grocery store chain called Giant Eagle. For our project we needed to create a basic prototype for how the web app may look or change. My team had just heard of a “new tool” called Figma that lets you draw up shapes and move them around, so we decided to do a very simple mockup there to show what the web app should be able to do. One night I started playing around in Figma and realized its capabilities and I stayed up all night turning our simple 2 screen prototype of squares to a descriptive working prototype. Once I showed the prototype to my professor, he pointed me in the direction of Design and told me about the similarities between Business and Design.

Although this wasn’t the comprehensive design process, I loved it and it opened my eyes to the possibilities out there. The next semester I applied to different HCI or Human Centered Design Masters programs and I ended up at the one in my backyard at CMU.