I started out university wanting to be a neuroscientist who studied the neurotransmitters that underlies human cognition. Or that's what got my sponsors to give me a full scholarship.

Through talking with professors and volunteering, I learned that all these incredibly smart researchers spent a lot of their time writing grants, rather than their actual research. While I recognize the importance of grant writing given the limited resources we have, I thought it was a little sad. I wondered if it would be easier for researchers to get funding if the process of taking knowledge from academia to applying it in the real world was more streamlined.

This is what got me to want to gain a holistic overview of the process of going from knowledge to application throughout my degree.

This led me to take an introductory course on HCI, which I realized was a field I LOVED. I was always fascinated by hoe our perception can impact how we view the world around us, and how we can all look at the same thing and have completely different views on it. HCI is a multi-disciplinary field, and I realized that this is one way my understanding of human cognition can be applied into a form that can be used by society. While streamlining knowledge application is a general problem I want to work on, I decided to center my degree around the topics of human cognition and HCI.

In the end, my degree gave me a very unique combination of skills:

• Through HCI courses and internships, I have extensive experience applying iterative design processes to create user-centric designs.

• I am well-knowledged about human cognitive processes and the underlying neural substrates.

• My background in academic research gives me a strong foundation for critical thinking, and creating design that is backed up by data. I am not allergic to academic papers, and I am well trained in making decisions that are founded with data and evidence.

• My experience in computer science means that I have experience from the devs' perspectives. I may not be the best coder, but I do understand how it works, and different factors that can affect their work.