How Personal Growth Led Me to UX
If someone had told me that I would end up being a Staff Accountant for six years after graduating college, I would have laughed in their face. You see, I graduated magna cum laude from a private university in San Antonio with a degree in Graphic Design. I’ll be honest, I did pretty well in my courses, but as a woman placed a bright yellow cord around my neck after arriving to my graduation, I became worried. I was the only person in my program who had one and imagined it was some version of a graduation dunce hat. After someone explained that magna cum laude is a good thing, I felt ready to take on the world!
When I walked past my professors, one of them pointed to the cord and mouthed, “How the — ?” One thing I left out was that I was kind of a handful. School grades were always important to me and I worked my butt off, but I fell asleep in class often, challenged my professors and thought I knew everything. Actually, let me take this moment to publicly apologize to Professor Clayton and Fagan, who taught me everything I know about design. I was an ungrateful twenty-something year old who was in need of some humbling life lessons.
The biggest humbling experience came in the form of never finding a job as a Graphic Designer after moving to Austin. I truly thought it was going to be easy to find a job as a junior designer, but the only thing I could get was an internship that traumatized me so much that I decided to give up on Graphic Design for good. I have a vivid memory of me crying while telling myself, “I can’t draw water! I just can’t!” after attempting to sketch stylized waves for a logo all day long. That was my breaking point. The tiny bit of the false confidence I had left from college floated away, never to be seen again.
I never set out to be a Staff Accountant. I took one Accounting class in college and absolutely hated it. After a couple years of stuffing patient charts at a clinic, I had a quarter life crisis. As a college grad who saw herself having a creative occupation, I was left feeling unfulfilled with my main task of placing papers into charts for eight hours a day. As co-workers came and went, I began to long for a job that made me feel like I was doing something with my life, so when I saw a job posting for an HR & Accounting Assistant that week, I decided to apply for it.
Thanks to that one college Accounting class I hated and the company’s mission of filling the position from within, I got the job. Because I was picking up on the basic Accounting principles so quickly, the CFO of the company asked me to become the Accounting Assistant full time after only 6 months of working for her. When I think back to that moment, my memory is a little skewed. I now see myself falling into a pit of numbers surrounded by money hungry shareholders as I said yes. I didn’t know it yet, but I was in hell and would come to feel trapped there for years to come. At that time, I was just excited to have a new career opportunity.
Turns out, I am not the best with numbers. In the six years I worked as a Staff Accountant, I overheard my co-workers, supervisor, and CFO call me an “idiot” multiple times on different occasions. One day, I finally had it and the respect I had for them vanished into thin air. Because of this I took on the role of the office outsider and that took a toll on me. I got in the awful habit of speaking to myself negatively on a daily basis and I even lost respect for myself. Being treated as though I was dumb almost every day for six years made me feel trapped because when your confidence has been stripped away, you feel lucky even have a job. Because I have always worked hard at what I do and excelled in everything in Accounting that had nothing to do with numbers, I wasn’t bad enough to be fired, but I wasn’t good enough to find another job in Accounting. I was in career purgatory.
I found out about UX in November of 2018. I woke up one morning after a night of crying about the job I was miserable at and decided to stay in bed and scroll through social media. You know…self care. I now know that this isn’t the best way to start your day off or lift your spirits, but that morning, it helped me decide what I want to do for the rest of my career. I luckily saw an ad for UX Design and decided to Google it. The first result that showed up was a wonderful video on YouTube called What the #$%@ is UX Design? It was love at first watch. At first, I couldn’t believe it was real. Could there really be a career that allowed me use my Graphic Design and analytical skills? A feeling of hope bubbled up inside of me. I hadn’t felt that in ten years!
I decided to attend an Intro to UX Design night at General Assembly shortly after falling in love with the idea of UX. In this class, I was back to feeling confident. I raised my hands and actually answered questions correctly! Some of the things taught that evening even felt like they were just second nature to me. An hour into the class, I felt kind of smart! I was finally using my brain for something I was interested in! After years of feeling brain dead at a job I hated, my brain felt revived.
When I got home that evening, I couldn’t stop talking about what I had experienced to my boyfriend. I hadn’t been excited for anything career related since we met, so he was seeing a version of myself that had been locked away for a very long time. At the time, I couldn’t quite understand why I was having such a strong reaction to the intro class. I recently realized that I felt that way because the person I was in that class was not an idiot. That’s because I never was one. Accounting just wasn’t for me. This one thought completely changed my view on the past five years and the vision I had for my future.
One year later, I’m in my second week of a UX Design Bootcamp at General Assembly and I absolutely LOVE it. I’ve realized that everything I’ve gone through since college is going to help me with my new career. I’d like to say that I’m back to being my old self, but I’m not. Through the humbling experiences I shared above and some really tough life obstacles that I overcame with my resilience, I feel new and improved. It turns out that working through hard times can shape you into someone who wants to help others. I am so excited that now I will be able to do that for a living…and in a really fun way!
