Digital Marketing

It’s been 8 months since I graduated from BrainStation full-time UX design bootcamp. It was an amazing experience which turned me to a designer as I wished.

A bit of my background: Before joining the program, I was working as a 3D artist in a VR studio, then quit coz it’s crap. Then I was home tutoring high-school kids for half a year, then stopped coz it’s frustrating (I was making good money out of it but not my thing). I wanted to be a designer doing some cool shit, but never had a job opportunity to get started. I sent my resume and portfolio to a bunch of companies in Vancouver, got responses, got tests, got interviews, but never got the position. I realized after leaving the industry for a couple of months (when I was tutoring) made my sense dull and skills rusty - I need a place where I could sharpen everything again and get my thunder back.

I’m gonna share some reasons I joined BrainStation and how the results ended up. If you have a similar situation and consider whether to join the program or not, my story may help you.

I’m a layman. I need a place to teach me both practices and theories. I tried counting on myself to learn the skillset and toolkit of UX design, but it was frustrating coz I literally didn’t know where to start! To learn software first? Or read books? Or do a small project? UX is such a giant shit blackhole and could almost suck everything in: business analysis, research, information architecture, UI design, interaction design, visual design, content writing, or even front-end if you wanna be entitled as ‘full-stack designer’ (fascinating) - whatever you can possibly associate with product development. Yeah UX design is such a sugarcoated beast, sounds high-end, easy-going, user-friendly, but in reality quite intimidating and could bite your head off - if you dive in blindly without fair guidance. As a 3D modeler before, I do know Adobe Suite, but in terms of the current tools of UI/UX design such as Sketch, InVision, Principle, etc., I’m a total outsider. Fortunately, during the pre-course, I learned the essentials of Sketch and InVision from the step-by-step tutorials; then throughout the next 10 weeks, I was improving my hard skills considerably by working on the weekly homework and capstone project. The instructor and TA would teach us tips every now and then to quicken our speed of work. As for theories, I do know user-centered design and some relevant approaches such as user stories, usability testing, but they were too scattered in my mind and never systematically came into shape as a ‘UX tree’ or ‘UX umbrella’. What BrainStation does is breaking down the whole UX topic to 10 smaller ones - each topic per week. Each week we focused on one topic and did homework around it to deepen our understanding. Meanwhile, we could update our capstone project by adopting the new stuff learned this week. The weekly basis is fast indeed, even crazy (using one week to investigate UI design, are you kidding, that’s even a job title!), but come on, this is a bootcamp and we only have 10 weeks. This curriculum is brilliant in my opinion (and PPT is well-done): it takes care of all epics of UX design such as research, IA, UI design, etc. - which should be mastered more or less as a UX-er; but in reality, we could (and should) leverage our advantages and choose to specialize in one or a few directions. Taking myself as an example, I’m more interested and better at visual stuff than research, IA or business whatever, so I actually put more weight on the chapters of UI and visual design but honestly much less on certain sections (I got 55/100 once in one of my assignments, shame… ).

I’m lazy. Yes if nobody pulls me up, I could stay in bed for whole day. I tried saving money and studied on my own - and wonderfully, I slept in till 11 am, opened my laptop reluctantly, and lost morale in one hour. You know what’s so good after I joined the program? I COULDN’T SLACK OFF! Yeah I was busy like shit: class from 9 to 5, homework stacking up, capstone project crying for feed, workshops awaiting, portfolio pending - gosh, don’t ever underestimate ‘FULL-TIME’ training (this is not a joke). Frankly, the workload is immense - I was working in the evening, during the weekend, sometimes burning night oil. It’s not only because I myself wanted to work harder, but once I saw my classmates working their asses off, how could I sit still and enjoy the couch potato time? Most importantly, we paid to learn, so the only way not wasting the money is - work hard!! It’s painstaking, but it will pay off. Everyone in my cohort was progressing so much - I’ve seen people who made stunning interfaces in the end even having zero design background at the very beginning.

I’m an introvert. I bet you all know socializing is as important as swimming when you’re in the job-hunting vortex. Sadly, I’m afraid of socializing and terrible at selling stuff. ESL is a reason but it’s more about my personality. I desperately needed a community at that moment where I could find a comfort zone with like-minded people. And yes BrainStation is like that for me. Amazingly, our cohort had 12 folks, and we teamed up differently for multiple projects, so everyone had a chance to work with each other. Every Friday, we went to a bar to grab beers after class. At the night of graduation, we barbecued and sang karaoke like a bunch of weirdos! People are professional at school but could be so wild afterward! Besides, the instructors are super approaching (yeah they joined our beer too) and other staff are quite helpful (just ask them if you need a favor.) In summary, if you’re like me, not good at networking, then at least you will have your cohort and the staff, which will become your own community and, it’s still growing.

Last but not least, I bet the tuition is a big concern to most of us and I admit it’s not a small amount indeed. I was jobless and broke from the moment I gave up on tutoring, so yeah I thought about this a lot. So I tried two options to make it less unaffordable: firstly, applying for the scholarship. Do ask the staff what kind of scholarship you are eligible for; secondly, there’s an installment option to pay off the debt in 12 months (and I chose this). Good news is you can use the tuition for tax return, yeah! And once you land on a new job after graduation, I suppose you won’t mind this educational investment. (The common salary of junior UI/UX designer in BC is 40k-50k)

In conclusion, this was my happiest training experience, maybe because I finally found what I like to do. I’m now a UI/UX designer in a development agency and having fun. I hope my story could help you in any way. Good luck and keep it up!

Insane.

That was the only word I could think of as I learned more about the school. I thought to myself that there is no way that a person like myself would ever learn so much information in such a short amount of time. Sure, I had a background in Computer Networking, but I did not feel that having such a background would help me that much. Fast-forward 3 months later, I am now confident in building a web application from scratch. From creating the look I was going for on the front-end to the overall functionality and communication on the back-end.

I have nothing but the utmost respect for the entire BrainStation team and I cannot thank them enough for the most amazing educational experience I’ve ever had. The one thing that I valued the most was that I felt like an actual human-being as opposed to just some other student with a number attached to my profile. You are surrounded by people who are there to help you grow, whether it be the instructor, classmates or people from a different program. During school I would always feel challenged and frustrated at a certain concept that I just would not understand, but as time passed, that feeling turned more into a sense of accomplishment.

If you are someone who is looking for a quick career change (and I really mean quick), BrainStation is the place to go.