Tag Archives: public affairs

Many peo­ple ask me, “how did you get from study­ing Polit­i­cal Sci­ence as an under­grad­u­ate, to work­ing for a soft­ware com­pany test­ing the usabil­ity of their prod­ucts?” Well, the truth is, it wasn’t a straight path, and I had no idea I would have come down this road to usabil­ity research. How­ever, what really hap­pened was that I was pur­su­ing dif­fer­ent careers, and check­ing them off my list for var­i­ous rea­sons. So here is the truth — three sto­ries of what pointed me to work­ing in research instead of law, pub­lic affairs, bio­med­ical libraries, etc.

Story #1: Work­ing in a Pub­lic Affairs Firm. Just before I grad­u­ated from col­lege, I decided I would like to put my degree to use by work­ing on pub­lic affairs cam­paigns at a PR firm. I was put to work as their “media mon­i­tor,” and it was my job to clip arti­cles that their clients were fea­tured or men­tioned in. I also had a part time job at the UC Santa Bar­bara David­son library that started at 1pm, and I could not be late. How­ever, the media clip­ping took me a while to grasp, and I could not fin­ish the work in the time given to me. I found myself stressed with dead­lines daily, and that every­one around me was the same way. After com­ing home cry­ing too many times, I decided to try work­ing for a law firm instead.

Story #2: Work­ing in a law firm. After I grad­u­ated from UC Santa Bar­bara, I started work­ing in a local law firm. I was a recep­tion­ist and clerk, and wanted to see what it was like to work in a law office. I was also study­ing to take the LSAT exam at the time, and work­ing part time in the UC Santa Bar­bara David­son Library. What I remem­ber most from that expe­ri­ence was how infe­rior some of the attor­neys treated me. When I’d try to trans­fer calls to them, they would yell at me, telling me not to dis­turb them. I over heard another say I should be replaced because I couldn’t scan their “evi­dence” into the machine fast enough. And another told me that I would never make it as a lawyer. I had so many neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences there, I decided to try another field.

Story #3: Work­ing in a Cor­po­rate Library. I applied to UCLA’s Infor­ma­tion Stud­ies pro­gram, and the fol­low­ing sum­mer started work­ing for Amgen’s cor­po­rate library. I was put on sev­eral projects to updates web sites, and cre­ate demo videos to teach sci­en­tists how to use the library data­bases. I enjoyed the energy of the busi­ness world, but found it was really chal­leng­ing to make change hap­pen in the com­pany. They also didn’t have very much fund­ing, which told me the com­pany didn’t value the incred­i­ble work the library offered to the orga­ni­za­tion. This trou­bled me, and I really wanted to find work where the value of the work I was doing was evident.

I took a Human Com­puter Inter­ac­tion class at UCLA, and learned how com­pa­nies test prod­ucts they make with cus­tomers first before releas­ing it. I learned how this research informed the design process, and helped make the prod­uct more user-friendly. The research was actu­ally mak­ing a dif­fer­ence. I had been so frus­trated in so many work­ing envi­ron­ments, being treated as though my work was not mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, but it seemed like if I could work in Human-Computer Inter­ac­tion, my work might actu­ally mean something.

I started work­ing as an intern at Cit­rix Online, and have loved work­ing there ever since. The com­pany truly val­ues the cus­tomers, and is truly cus­tomer cen­tric. I’m incred­i­bly lucky, and grate­ful to have found a com­pany like this.