Getting a Job Out Of College

I recently responded to a r/txstate Reddit post asking about getting a job out of the Communication Design program with just a portfolio site – a daunting challenge. This person was swaying UI/UX, and it struck a chord with me as that had been my exact path.

Going into college, I was dead-set on being a graphic designer – a print designer, specifically. I loaded up on major classes early, then burned out on the “design can save the world” ethos that you get getting a fine arts degree. My junior year, I took Interactive Design 1 and found myself in a class learning HTML and CSS — something I’d been doing since 2003. I quickly pivoted to playing World of Warcraft full-time in the back of the class.

Next year, I found myself taking Interactive Design II, where I finally decided to participate. That class, taught by Sameera Kapila, focused on new-at-the-time Responsive Web Design. The more challenging projects finally caught my interest and I dug in.

I entered the “I want this to have this feature, I will figure out how to add this feature” loop for the the first time, as I realized I wanted interactivity would need JQuery for, and then persistence I leaned on Ruby on Rails for. I opened my first StackOverflow issue which truly made me a developer.

Then, I did the single most important thing for getting a job out of college: I got lucky.

Not only did I land an internship; but at the end of that internship, having not gotten picked up as a FTE, the only other developer broke his ankle and was home-bound. In a world before WFH, that meant they needed to quickly hire another developer without the budget for a real one – perfect scraps for the recently-vetted intern.

I realize this is a very irritating thing to write, and you’re right to be annoyed.