<aside> 💁🏻♀️ Yumi is a senior with a primary major in Human-computer Interaction. Over the past summers, Yumi did a research internship with the REU program and a Software Engineering Internship at Facebook.
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💡 Why did you choose to pursue a degree in HCI?
💁🏻♀️: I’ve always been interested in the intersection between design and tech… more specifically, the advancements in tech and helping people be more connected through it.
💡 What are some of your favorite classes, and what makes them unique?
💁🏻♀️: My favorite class is Designing AI Products and Services (05-317) by John Zimmerman and Jodi Forzilli.
The course has people from all different backgrounds -- not only diversity in that both undergraduate students and graduate students take it but also in that it features many other aspiring occupations including product managers to engineers.
In one of the projects from this class, you will create a conversational agent like Alexa, which was really interesting because it was my first time designing an assistant. Every unit, we have new themes to base our projects on! For instance, we had to make a game off of Hansel and Gretel.
🦆 Fun Fact: Yumi and Bill (one of the Interaction Nerds editors) took Designing AI Products and Services in Spring 2021 together. They were teammates on their first group project.
💁🏻♀️: Another course I love is Human AI Interaction (05-318) by Prof. Haiyi Zhu and Prof. Steven Wu.
This class is more on the tech side, and it presents all the different technical fields, including reading interesting research papers!
<aside> 💁🏻♀️ Pro Tip from Yumi: “You can still do really well in these classes even if you’re new to AI/coding!”
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💁🏻♀️: This is a typical course where you have two weeks to come up with a game, make it, design it, and test it out! The class starts off with a really fun game jam similar to hackathons except with games!
💁🏻♀️: “This is usually a team-based course featuring a project to create your own new perspective on the popular Dungeons and Dragons game where your project is focused on how to immerse your user and player in the world you build! You learn a lot about how to design and player-to-player interaction- a 10/10 class!”