What I’m Doing Now: My First Steps in Becoming a UX Designer with Ironhack
This coming February, I will be starting my training to become a UX/UI Designer with Ironhack at one of their Full-Time Paris Bootcamps. UX and UI Design haven’t always been where I’ve wanted to be, yet I now struggle to see myself working in a different field. This is the story of how I got where I am today and started doing what I’m doing now.
After obtaining a humanities baccalaureat, I was lucky enough to get into Sciences Po Toulouse at the age of 18. I discovered a passion for sociology but also realised that law and economics were not subjects that particularly made me tick and that I had applied for the school for all the wrong reasons. I left after a year. Following such a heavy choice, I went on to do a Service Civique (which is a sort of volunteering experience, though it’s actually just used by companies and collectives to not hire workers and underpay 18 to 26-year-olds) in communication in the performing arts. I specifically worked for a puppeteering company, a choice that to this day makes my mind boggle since I’m terrified of puppets.
Following quite an awful experience, I went on to study communications and performing arts in a degree that did not live up to the idea that I had of it in my head. After quitting in my third year of bachelor’s because the degree had become purely communication-based and very much geared towards communication in a business setting, I decided to finish university this year by studying Cultural Mediation and Event Management.
This year, despite COVID, was a dream. The people in my class were passionate, driven and very singular in their interests and contributed to an incredibly stimulating work environment. I was also studying a plethora of different domains and subjects, from Historical Anthropology to History of Art, Ethnomusicology to Intercultural Mediation. The most important part of it, however, was being able to reflect on what I wanted from life and who I was.
All these choices amounted to the drive that had inhabited me since leaving Sciences Po, which was to work in the music industry and more specifically in live music. I had been organising concerts since September 2019 and with the COVID pandemic seeming like it was here to stay, I started to have my doubts.
In July 2020, I got my degree and thus began the hard realisation of what working in the cultural sector in France was truly like.
After months of job applications without even a rejection, trying to network while living in a rural area of France where nothing ever happens and becoming too accustomed to a lifestyle which you should only be living when you have chosen to retire in the country, I found myself in need of finding a job to be able to get out of the house, restart my twenties and start putting money aside in the hopes of being able to pursue a masters degree in September 2021.
One thing that is important to note in terms of the music industry, and more broadly the cultural sector in France, is how difficult it is to find a job because of how saturated the market is. I have been volunteering in the associative sector since I was 13, have organised my own events, have networked a fair amount in my short life and, all of this considered, my experience and measly bachelors were not enough for recruiters.
I started working in a small chain of restaurants in the city of Lyon in October, just to be let go of a couple of weeks later because I had been in contact with someone with COVID and informed my colleagues, going against the orders of my boss.
This led me to be forced to leave my new life, apartment and friends and go back to square one. This is where everything changed.
After a week or two of going through the motions, I had the realisation that for the first time in my life, I had all the time in the world to learn what I wanted to learn and do what I wanted to do.
My parents being people who are particularly at risk in COVID standards and the numbers growing ever higher in France, I decided to put the job search on hold and concentrate on learning Norwegian, a language that I’ve wanted to learn for the better half of a decade but also take the time every day to learn more about Graphic Design.
Meanwhile, my friend Clara (check her out) was working her way to becoming a web developer and had mentioned the Ironhack Bootcamps a couple of months earlier because she had received a scholarship during their partnership with Vinted. I started studying with FreeCodeCamp since I had learned a bit of HTML and CSS at university and to understand what was making her so happy. A friend we share is also in the tech industry and works as an art director and UX Designer in a startup in France. While talking about graphic design, he told me, since I had also shown interest in applied design in coding, to look into UX and UI as an option.
A week later, an email arrived in my Gmail’s junk folder from Indeed, telling me about a partnership they had with Ironhack. The coincidences were too much, I applied, passed the Technical Test and Interview and was one of the 10 people to receive a 50 % scholarship for their UX/UI Design Bootcamp.
Having paid the deposit and started the Prework, I have found myself not only reflecting on my past attempts at joining the job market (it’s quite ironic how a couple of years ago I wrote about how hard it was to study with multiple interests seeing where I have ended up) but also what I expect out of the next few months.
As a person, I have never been inclined to sit around and do nothing. My volunteer experiences in the cultural sector have shaped me to be a go-getter and I have always strived to learn something new, may it be a new skill, new facts from books or generally just being curious about other peoples’ experience and lessons they have learned from life. This is what led me to take a leap, though a thoughtful leap, into learning a job that combines two domains that I’ve always felt illegitimate to pursue: Design and Technology.
One of the reasons I applied for this Bootcamp, apart from the fact that I was starting to truly struggle to learn UX and UI alone, is the fact that I strive to be around like-minded, motivated individuals. I work best when I’m surrounded by creative and driven people, something I long for even more since COVID. When choosing which Bootcamp you want to attend, you are given the choice of whether you want to study remotely or with their new hybrid format (having the option to either work on the Paris Campus or remotely every day, according to the pandemic situation at that time). It was a no brainer.
How can you become a good UX Designer if you’re not in contact with people?
Another thing that is keeping me motivated in this career change is the prospect of being useful, and creating in a useful way. I spent a lot of my studies and personal projects focussing on accessibility and representation. One of the main reasons that I have chosen UX/UI design is the fact that I want to create for people in the hopes of making their lives simpler, more enjoyable and overall better.
All in all, the prework and required reading is thorough, all of the employees at Ironhack that I’ve had the chance to talk to have been lovely and very helpful and I just have a good feeling about what is to come.
I’ve written this article in the hopes that it might help people like me. May it be someone looking into studying UX/UI to show that there is no path set in stone to get into a course, or someone who is just feeling a bit lost in the current job market, it’s never too late to try something new.
I’m 24 years old which feels incredibly old to not be in a set career path and only just finished a degree but also immensely young in the grand scheme of things.
After such a hard year, it seems as though things are looking up.
I can’t wait to get started.
