🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA
This week from Investigation & Connection: HCI electives, UX pathways, and post-grad HCI options!
👋 Announcements — First Week of Classes with Investigation & Connection
Welcome back to Investigation & Connection! We hope that everyone had a great first week back. This week, we are introducing a new format for our Campus Compass. Previously, we recommended shorter non-HCI courses that could be added to your existing schedule for the fall. This time, we will begin to cover HCI electives in more depth, so you can begin to plan for your future schedule! 🗓
Beyond the Campus Compass, join us for an interview with Robyn Lee, where we discuss entering the UI/UX field from a self-taught background, and a chat with Dr. Cori Faklaris about how to weigh post-graduate options. 🎓
🐒 Campus Compass — Art and Machine Learning
Using technology to create art makes a comeback in this week’s Investigation & Connection issue! Archive & Collection put out great issues (here and here) sharing awesome examples of technologies in creating art. If you found these issues interesting, you might be thinking about how you can get involved in such cool content. Look no further! Check out 10-225/10-615 Art and Machine Learning!
Art and ML is a project-based class that explores the intersection of art and machine learning. It welcomes students from both those fields and others, as long as they have experience in Python coding, understanding of the necessary mathematical background, and are open to discussing the conceptual development and artistic value of their projects. Check out the syllabus and some student works from previous year's class here! 10-335 and 10-615 students will work on the same kind of projects, however, the evaluation criteria will be different for students from the two sections. The details of projects and algorithms we study change every year as this field advances quickly.
Archive and Collection gave us a taste of the art technology can create in its great articles about DALLE-2, HTML generated SVG grids, and user interface generation. If you enjoyed these articles, keep an eye out for Art and ML in future semesters. What will you create using machine learning? 👀
🤩 Student Spotlight — Breaking into HCI with Robyn Lee
Wondering how to enter the field of UX? Don’t know where to start? This week, we interviewed Robyn Lee, a rising senior double-majoring in Business Administration and HCI. Robyn shares her experience with HCI, including how she started off in a very non-traditional UX background and how she was able to learn core UX skills on her own! 🧐
Don’t be scared to learn on your own first–you don’t necessarily need to have taken a certain class or have had a job first to break into the field.
— Robyn Lee
🌟 Field Trip — HCI Masters vs. PhD with Cori Faklaris
What comes after graduation? Industry? Grad school? Master’s or PhD? The options can seem overwhelming! If these are some questions on your mind, take a look at our conversation with Dr. Cori Faklaris as we dive deeper into the differences between Master’s and PhD programs as well as the pros and cons of going into industry before grad school! 🧐
For a PhD, it's about who I know, who can vouch for me, how I've learned to communicate, and what uniqueness I can bring to the program.
— Cori Faklaris
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this work are Sophie McGrady, Caleb Sun, and Rebecca Jiang.
🥰 Follow Us
We look forward to co-curating future content with you! Let us know how you think about the content and send us some good vibes through these channels below.
Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | UXA Website
🌱 Join the Community
Join the Slack channel to get updates on upcoming events, learn about cool resources and opportunities, ask questions about anything HCI, and much more.