Can you tell me and tell us a little bit about yourself?

I’m originally from Washington state from the South Puget Sound area, south of Seattle. I lived there until I finished high school, and then I went to undergrad fo history at New York City College of Columbia. And then after undergrad, I ended up teaching English in East Asia for a couple of years. I taught for one semester in China. In Northern China, I taught high school, and then I taught high school for a year in northern Japan, and I taught kindergarten and elementary in a Kansai region, like Osaka area of Japan for another year. After that, I guess at that time I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, and I was thinking about becoming an instructional designer, so I applied for the program at NYU and then I moved from Osaka to New York to do DMDL.

When did you graduate?

It must’ve been two and a half years ago, so winter January 2017 is my graduation date.

Okay, so you gave a little bit about your educational background. So it was mostly history?

Yeah, so I did it in undergrad in history, but partially just because I can take a lot of language classes and study abroad and still graduate in four years.

You have a lot of teaching experience. So what was your goal in pursuing a degree in DMDL?

I was interested in doing something related to education, but I didn’t necessarily want to keep teaching. And I was also sort of rapidly gaining interest in technology and how technology can be applied to education. So my goal was largely career-oriented. I was looking for the next step and something connected to technology and education.

Did you find that you were using technology when you were teaching?

When I taught high school, it was pretty unreliant on technology. It’s partially cultural and part of the school systems in Japan, there’s very little technology in use. And they use sort of a different style of teaching than maybe what’s common here, a little bit more memorization-focused and very lecture-based.

I’m just curious how you became interested in technology then.

I guess it was because I didn’t have any access to it. I was sort of brainstorming where I’d come up with ideas as to how I could use it or I’d think about how far I could push a class that’s based around a powerpoint presentation and a worksheet. Because I didn’t have much of it, I thought a lot about what might be possible with technology in the classroom.

id you achieve that goal? Of merging technology and education? And I guess you could tell me what you’re currently doing with that.

Yeah, so in a way, I did. So when I started, I was thinking I’d become an instructional designer, but as time went on, I realized that whenever I had a project for any class, I guess I was more interested in building platforms or games, so that ended up morphing, and I did not become an instructional designer. I ended up getting into product work, product-management type of work and so when I got out, since I didn’t achieve that goal, I started running and working on a product at NYU for academic technology. So in that sense, I did achieve that goal. And then that has lead to my current role which is a product manager at a company called Timicky Labs. And we’re an agency, a product consultancy, so we help entrepreneurs, usually early-stage entrepreneurs, build technology for their businesses.

Cool. So can you give me an example of that?

Sure. Let’s see. I guess it’s more specifically if someone has an idea and they don’t have a technical team, they’ll come to us and we can help them build a version of that product which they can either apply directly to their business or they can use to get more funding for their start-up. But it really ranges widely. Currently I’m working on everything from a productivity app to a fitness app to a news organization mobile app. Yeah, it’s a lot of different things.

Wow. Sounds intense, I don’t know how you keep track of everything. Can you give me an example of a company you designed a product for? Are you allowed to share that information?

I don’t have anything going on at the moment. I think that within NYU I spend a lot of time working on NYU web publishing. It’s a wordpress-based website building tool. So any NYU student, faculty, or staff can create their own website.

Okay so how did your schooling at NYU help you with your current position?

I think that the DMDL program, although it was education-technology-focused, and at the moment in my current projects I don’t have an ed-tech app, the first thing is the concepts, the comp-sci teachings, even a lot of the learning sciences pieces are applicable to all sorts of interaction design and user-experience design. In addition, in DMDL, you get exposure to a lot of different topics and a lot of different ideas. And classically one of the more direct pieces is in the thesis project. One of the options was to essentially build a prototype and a pitch for an app. And that’s a good part of the business that I’m involved in now, is helping people come up with a prototype and a pitch for their business idea. So it’s almost direct experience.

Do you feel that you were lacking any informational skills when you started the job? And if you were, how did you learn them?

It's been interesting. At NYU, I feel like I was a bit more product-focused and less hands-on, managing timelines and projects. But coming into this role, there’s a lot more project-management, which I’ve sort of had to get up to speed on. But how I’ve been learning a lot of that has been just through my peers, through the other product managers here, and through the director of product management, who has taken a lot of time to help me build up the project-management side of my skill set.

Do you manage projects? Is that how it works? And you have people working with you? Under you? How does that work?

Basically for a project that comes in, an entrepreneur comes in with their idea. Once they’re signed, we create a team within the company, so it’ll be myself as a product manager, and then we have a CTO and developers. The CTO sort of leads where the technology’s going and the product manager is there to help keep the project moving and also to have an understanding of the product and sort of apply product-thinking and give advice on how to build successful products and that includes things like design. There’s also design which comes into some projects but it depends on the client.

Well, I’m just thinking about it for myself. Like that step going from school to that seems intense, a lot of knowledge came out with a lot of skill and knowledge. You went through all that?

Yeah well, I was at NYU for more than two years, so I picked up a lot of knowledge about software development and general development, so that’s sort of a thing there. So I think that I needed DMDL to get to my roles at NYU, but this is the extension of that, and I want to build on that.

Have you remained in contact with faculty or other students at DMDL?

Yeah! One of the cool things of working at NYU is that you do have a lot of contact with other students, so it was through a classmate where I sort of landed my first contract role at NYU, and then sort of working there, I’ve stayed in touch with a lot of other classmates and people who entered the program in later cohorts after me.

Do you have any words of advice for those in the middle of pursuing their degree? Or anyone about to start their degree?

I think what everyone says about any post-secondary education is that you get out of it what you put in to. And I feel like I put in a lot of time around some of the technical pieces and building up technical skills while I was there. And I think that has played out in interesting ways.

How did you build up those technical skills?

A lot of it was on the side, a lot of it was just my own interest but I did also take some of the classes in IDM, I think was the other program. We were sharing spaces at the time. I took one or two IDM classes and there was a lot more expectation of just being able to code and being able to develop little games or apps and things like that. I guess to expand on that a little bit, the way it’s played out is that now my role, a lot of it is based around being able to communicate between design, development, and business. And getting to IDM, taking classes where it’s mostly just other engineers, I guess where it’s mostly engineers I should say, and learning about code and discussing code and how to build things with the professor and other students, that’s pretty helpful to be able to talk on the phone or get on Slack with a developer and being able to communicate with them about a technical topic even if, you know, I’m definitely not up to their level. But we can communicate, we can figure out what needs to get done.

Anything else? Any other thoughts you’d like to share that I missed?

I would reiterate another common piece of grad school advice is that the network is so important. The people that you meet in the program and folks you have classes with or become friends with and that sort of thing, it’s really critical, I think, for going forward. It might not be what you’re first looking for a job but it did work out for me. But as time goes on, it can be really helpful in connecting to jobs and just staying in touch with folks in the industry.

The skill set which you learn is applicable in a lot of different places and is sort of one way that I’ve been thinking about it. When I left NYU to come here, I was thinking about the fact that I did go to school for education, I’m really interested in education, and I don’t know if I’m going to get as much educational-focused work here but thinking about the longer-term career, big experiences that might not be focused on educational technology, but user experiences is building a lot of stuff and working on a lot of different applications with a lot of different folks. You know, maybe someday in the future, that’ll put me in a really good position to land with a really great ed-tech company.