“Last year I decided to go on exchange and I was really lucky to get into University College London. I took ‘Human-Computer Interaction’ since it wasn’t something that was offered here, and I ended up getting very interested in this whole user-experience design thing. I never thought that I would be able to do any kind of design work by myself and I wasn’t really interested in computer science; these are two fields that didn’t fit into my Holland code. But as I started taking that course, the professor talked about how usability is important in daily life; how people make it so addictive using cognitive psychology principles. So I started reading more design work—simplicity, minimalism, and typology, different kinds of colours and graphic designs. And now I’m thinking about a career change, even though I don’t have one yet!”
“Do you have plans to go back to England? It sounds like you really enjoyed it there.”
“I really want to go back to London, for sure. But I’m also a little bit afraid. When I go back I’ll really want to settle in there and I’ll see the whole city in a different perspective, and it will just feel like another city I’ve lived in! … I feel like everyone in London’s so put together—don’t really care about things but always presenting themselves in the best way. People don’t judge you for dressing the way you are, and people don’t judge you for your accents either. So you can totally be whoever you want to be. I was really just trying to adopt their attitudes and manners in life.”