Career

Four UX industry leaders came to SI tonight to talk about 'What makes an effective UX professional;' the event was put on by Michigan UPA (MUPA), the Michigan/Ohio chapter of CHI (MOCHI), the Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction at the School of Information (SOCHI), and the School of Information Career Development Office. Each panelist gave an introduction and some tips, and then the panelists took questions from the audience. Following are some liveblogged notes from each panelist's individual talk as well as a summary of the panel discussion.

Graduating and looking frantically for HCI-related work? Here to the rescue is SI Career Counselor extraordinaire Kelly Kowatch who recently posted on HCI job sites.

Joanna Kroll from SI Career Services gave students a view from the job searching trenches in her talk "Job Searching in a Tight Market." Though the news in the paper is dire (massive layoffs at Microsoft and Yahoo, a hiring freeze at Google) there is evidence that degrees such as HCI are still in demand.

HCI student Katie McCurdy was nice enough to share tips from SI's recent portfolio review:

This is the time of year when resume and portfolio stress starts chipping away at grad students’ calm veneer. The dubious economy seems to have resulted in fewer job and internship listings, which increases competition for positions.

Source: Flickr

This week SOCHI hosted its annual resume review session for HCI students. Students exchange resumes and gave each other feedback and shared tips with the group. Kelly Kowatch from SI Career Services was on hand to give helpful resume writing advice for students looking for internships and full time jobs. Some of the suggestions that came out of the review included:

Do's:

• Join a professional organization such as ACM SIGCHI or the Information Architecture Institute and put this on your resume.

In our first tech talk of the new year SOCHI invited Dug Song, VP of Engineering for Zattoo, to speak about the local Ann Arbor company's internet TV service. Zattoo's web application allows users to watch live TV via the site's channels on their personal computer. So far they have over 4 million registered users in Europe for their service.

Today SI Career Services held a panel called "A Day in the Life: HCI Professionals".

The panel included:
Suzanne Chapman, Interface and User Testing Specialist, UM Digital Library
Theresa Maddix, Satisfaction Research Analyst, ForeSee Results
Mike Beasley, User Experiologist, Pure Visibility
Dan Cooney, Independent Consultant, Cooney Information Group, LLC.

Here are the notes from the session:

An SI alum recently contacted me looking for these HCI interview questions:

These were an awesome set (I used them for preparing for my Microsoft interviews, and indeed got the job with thanks to them!) - I've referred them to other students now graduating but they're apparently offline?

Please consider putting these back --- they were outstanding!

These questions were compiled by SI career services from feedback and input from employers who actively recruit SI students for IA, Usability and Design positions.

This Friday, SI Career Services hosted a "Speed Networking" event for SI students and alumni. The goal of this event was to gather career information from professionals in the field, such as what skills are necessary for their jobs, and what they look for in potential hires. After attending this event, I can say I came away with a lot of knowledge, and even some interesting, unexpected advice.

On Thursday, September 11th SOCHI hosted an informal gathering for 2nd year HCI students to speak about their summer internship experiences. SOCHI board member Debra Lauterbach facilitated the discussion. Meeting notes were recorded by board member Maureen Hanratty.

Speakers

Debra: User Experience Designer, TechSmith (Okemos, MI)
Chris: Interaction Designer, Yahoo (Sunnyvale, CA)
Mark: Intern, Initiative for Innovative Computing, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
Jon: Huge (Brooklyn, NY)