About

Hi there! My name is Catherine.

I’m an aspiring UX Designer / engineer.

I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Michigan in 2022. After a couple summer internships and working as a full-time software engineer at Meta, it wasn’t until layoff season in April 2023 that I truly discovered where my passions lied: creating user experiences that truly made an impact on people’s wellbeing.

Here is my professional resume.

Looking back

I’ve always been an empathetic girl with a knack for design and problem solving. I was that one artsy kid in class growing up through elementary and middle school. Thanks to my parents, I enrolled in a creatively-driven high school and spent most of my after-school hours in the studio, drawing still-lifes, painting watercolor portraits, or working on my architecture portfolio (yes I was in architecture school). Outside of that, I spent my free time on Adobe Illustrator doing freelance graphic design for those who knew me or with a Muji pen (iykyk) in hand drawing cartoons for the school newspaper. After a year in architecture school, though, my interest in physics and 3D shapes proved to be nonexistent and my first college programming class satisfied a craving for problem solving and analytical thinking that I didn’t know I had.

My Favorite Software Project (and how it relates to my career Goals…)

I truly enjoyed the experiences I had as a software engineer. My favorite was Summer of 2021, when I was a Facebook intern on the Group Sharing Experiences Team and worked directly on the new Public Groups Experience. My role was to work directly with UX designers to implement the pending user participation posting experience on web in React. Basically, the workflow looked like this:

A non-member of a public group writes up a post > clicks ‘Submit’ > answers admin questions > is shown an informative dialog about their content awaiting admit approval > finally, a “pending” post renders at the top of the feed that is only visible to the author.

Some challenges I faced were trying to make the new feed UI component compatible with the way Facebook feed components dynamically render (let me tell you, it wasn’t a simple copy and paste <PendingPost props={…} />). Today, I personally don’t post much to Facebook, so I’m uncertain whether some or all of this feature ever made it to production. Regardless, I was proud.

It was exhilarating being part of the design process and imagining how real users would interact, react, and feel from using a feature I implemented. One interesting UX problem we (me and the amazing UX team) experimented with was deciding whether to show a ‘Cancel’ button, a ‘Why?’ button, both, or neither in the popup dialog after a user submitted a post. I found the psychology of trying to predict user behavior for this seemingly-small design choice especially interesting as someone on the engineering side and saw the results firsthand in A/B testing. However, I also experienced the drawbacks of business-oriented priorities for the first time because IIRC removing the ‘Cancel’ button made users less likely to succumb to post-post affect, which technically increased user engagement in Groups, but overall made it way harder for someone to delete content they simply changed their mind on wanting to post.

Anyhow, I believe this internship experience was what opened my doors to UX and it’s what guides me today in my career search.

Outside of my desk

I like hot yoga, reading self-improvement books, sketching everyday objects, and cooking new foods inspired by TikTok or J. Kenji Lopez Alt’s cookbook.

Things that changed my life (and might change yours):

• The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown.

• The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez Alt.

• Cat/cows in the morning and before bed.

• Drinking lots of water and sleeping early.