![]() ![]() ![]() What was a typical day like for Alvin while attending UX Academy? He offered me so much advice and perspectives that I would otherwise be unaware about. My career coach, Poyi, also has been a treasure trove of insights and information while I was job searching and interviewing.It pushed me to develop a great mindset for design and my mentor, Alan, was really reliable and professional! I loved the 1-on-1 mentoring experience.I liked that there were briefs, but also room for creativity for choosing what projects we wanted to work on and include in our portfolios.The coursework was straightforward and really built on top of one another really well.Desktop mock from the homepage of Alvin's first project, Mirror. He prepared for UX Academy by having informational chats with designers, watching videos of designers talking about their work, reading articles online and design books.Īlvin had already transitioned careers before when going into engineering through a coding bootcamp, so he was aware of what to expect and the work required to make a career transition. “I was considering HR operations, but ultimately realized I had always been curious about UX design-from when I first saw a friend doing it in college-and knew that this was the right point in my life to pursue the option and embrace it as a fulfilling career since it was the perfect intersection of all my interests and skill sets.” He narrowed it down to two fields: Human Resources or Design. My energy level would be very low and I would be mentally taxed from having to force my brain to work in a way that didn’t come very naturally to me.”Īlvin decided to leave his job with LinkedIn in the hopes of following a new career path that tied more closely with his natural abilities. “My personality didn’t really fit with the engineering team either. “This person mentioned they saw potential in me because of how much I thought about the user experience and the product side of the features I was working on.”Īlvin felt like if he moved forward with engineering, he wouldn’t be able to leverage or nurture his natural strengths of empathy, conversation, collaboration, and creative thinking-generally the more human side of things. “I had times where I’d have to make design decisions on my own, and it was really neat to get exposure to that and work with the designer,” Alvin says. He found himself enjoying the conversations about product design more than code. Yet, while software engineering was a fulfilling career for a year and a half, Alvin knew it wasn’t a perfect fit. And then, a full-time position as a Software Engineer at LinkedIn that relocated him to the Silicon Valley. This led to an apprenticeship as a Software Engineer Fellow at Spotify in New York City. He quickly saw optometry wasn’t for him, and pivoted into a software engineering bootcamp instead. Like many of us, Alvin Kuang has spent the last six years since graduating from college trying on different careers.Īfter graduating from the University of California, San Diego with a BS in Psychology and Biological Sciences, he spent a month in optometry school. ![]()
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