Hello! My name is Janelle (nickname Jaz), I’ve spent the past 10 years teaching comics and animation - among other side hustles - and recently, I decided to become a student again. I’ve watched students, my favorite people in the world, learn and grow for years. I figured if they can do it, then so can I. Instead of heading to grad school for a few more years, I thought a bootcamp would give me the kick in the pants I needed to change careers, and be a breeze besides. If you’re a former student of mine reading this, that’s your cue to be smug.
Getting through my UX bootcamp is taking longer than I thought it would. Again, coming from teaching, I pompously assumed I was a master of managing my time and pushing through work. And again, to any students reading, please cackle loudly at me. I am humbled daily by how wrong I was. There are articles to read, projects to complete, and programs to learn. That last bit is my favorite. Give me a new program, an idea of what it’s supposed to do, and a few hours, and that’s a relaxing day for me. Even the new concepts are interesting. It’s the jargon that’s throwing me.
“Downloading,” as I and everyone who has spent extensive time with computers since 1996 has learned, means taking a file from online and pulling it into an offline format. In UX, that same term means writing ideas on sticky notes. Strange. But I’m all for new contexts, so I’m doing my best to make “downloading” stick (ha), as well as the other new words and phrases that mean very different things in other spaces.
I’m liking User Experience for the combination of tasks I already enjoy: many of my comics are interview-based, and UX research is heavy on surveys, interviews, and user tests. Prototyping products lets me use my animation skills. A colleague even told me about their Instructional Design career, which sounds a lot like lesson planning, but without getting to reference Richard Williams’ time management (or my own). There are a lot of options.
Studying death midwifery didn’t seem this intense. But, I’m here now, and we do the best we can, don’t we?