internships & jobs

Yelp provides a suite of tools connecting people to local business through community contributed reviews is at the frontier of motivating to users to contribute. They currently boast about 25 million unique hits per month, and growing quickly, thanks in part to the efforts of their Community Managers.

SOCHI was privileged to hold a brown-bag lunch with two such community managers, Mariah Cherem and Colleen Curtis from Yelp.com. Mariah is the current Metro Detroit Community Manager, and Colleen was the Chicago Community Manager. They provided a great view of what's it like to work for one of the country's best known social media companies. They talked about how they foster the sense of community and keep their users happy and reviewing.

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.

Following UX tweeps is a great way to envelop yourself in the UX community, stay on top of trends, and position yourself as an active and interested UX professional. Elizabeth at Luminanze Consulting recently posted a lengthy (though not comprehensive) list of UX professionals' twitter handles and names on the Luminanze blog.

Overwhelmed? Follow some of the names you recognize, and then look at who those people follow. The real gems are those who tend to share a lot of information, normally via links.

For the second year in a row, a team of SI students has won a spot in the competitive RPM-10 Venture Program, allowing them to create and work on their own startup company for 10 weeks during the summer. This year, SI students (l to r) Sergio Mendez, Eric Garcia, Ben Malley, and Jeremy Canfield have been busy at work for Phonagle, their company centered around developing social games for the iPhone. Recently, Phonagle and their workspace at the TechArb were featured in the Ann Arbor Chronicle.

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.

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)