University of Michigan

School Spirit

It is honestly so cool going from an extremely small middle school to a small high school to a giant public university like Michigan. It is crazy though how often you see people you know even at such a big school. My high school had no school spirit, our football team is the worst in the county. Therefore, school spirit was a big deal coming to college. I like going to football games at The Big House, the largest sports stadium in the United States (second largest in the world), basketball games at Crisler Center, and hockey games at Yost Arena. It is also super cool to see athletes around campus and take pictures with them. Honestly, I am in awe sometimes by the fact that I go to the University of Michigan. My dad and my dad's entire side of the family went to Michigan (I am the ninth in my family).

Classes

As far as the education aspect, there are so many classes offered that are so cool and unique. The most notable one that I have taken is a series of courses called succeeding at failing. The first class in the series was titled “Opportunity in the Age of Intelligent Machines”, where we spent the whole semester trying to answer the question “what will you do when machines do everything?”. We spent a lot of time learning about increasing robot abilities and how they will improve in the future. We did group projects researching intelligent machines. One presentation, my group mate even interviewed an artist who created a robot that paints in certain style settings. I am currently in The next class in that series, called “The Art of Entrepreneurship in the Information Age.” I am planning on taking the last class in the series, “The Science of Entrepreneurship in the Information Age”, next semester. Another cool class I took was “Entrepreneurial Creativity”, and for that class we had to create our own small business. My group created a profitable business selling sorority house stickers that we designed ourselves (shown in picture).

School of Information

After one semester of being in the School of Literature, Science and Arts (LSA), I decided that I wanted to be in the School of Information to study User Experience Design with a minor in Entrepreneurship. I realized that User Experience was a perfect combination of my interests in coding, design, and user empathy. The School of Information is a school that you apply to get into in the second semester of your Sophomore year. It was a really stressful experience for me to get into, but throughout my freshman and sophomore years, I did a lot of programs to demonstrate my interest. I became a research assistant for a PhD student helping her with her UX project. I was invited to an independent study where we studied different languages and created a huge collaborative concept map. Once I got into the school, I was opened up to even more opportunities. I was able to be involved in different relevant experiences. For example, I joined CUTGroup and prepared, conducted, and synthesized user testing for the city of Detroit. In addition, I proctored user testing for the University. I feel super grateful to be a part of such a great program and to have the opportunities it presents. I am able to explore more of my career aspirations while in college. CUTGroup made me question my decision to focus heavily on design and not so much on research. I think future classes will help me with this decision.