I wasn’t chasing a career in tech. I just wanted to take an art class. Unfortunately, the art program was cut entirely. So, the counselor suggested web design. “It’s kinda like art,” she said. That was enough for me to say yes.

Then came the catch. In order to take the class, I had to enroll in the Computer Science degree program.

I had no real background in it. I’d taken one computer science class in high school, but we mostly just translated binary code. I did own a computer, but I had no idea how it actually worked. Up until that point, it was just something I used to write essays and chat on AOL. Beyond that it was a mystery to me. And now I was about to major in it.

But something about it pulled at me. There was a thread there. I didn’t know what it connected to. I just knew it was worth pulling. The first internet bubble was crashing as I enrolled in 2000. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew the internet wasn’t going away. It felt important. And I wanted to understand it.

I ended up doing well. The math came easy enough. Learning how to speak "computer" and make it do things was empowering. For the first time, tech wasn’t just a mystery. It was something I could shape. That felt good. I liked it.

I also got selected for an experimental program at Hudson County Community College called the Interdisciplinary Learning Community. It blended psychology, writing, and speech. And it brought me right back to high school and the Palette Paradigm. That same sense of wonder, of seeing connections between things that weren’t supposed to be connected. It was familiar. It made learning feel like discovery again.

This wasn’t the moment I found my career path. I didn’t even know this technical education would play a role in being a designer just a few short years later. However, I started to notice that I preferred to focus on the interface elements rather than the application layer. I liked making things interactive. I liked the intersection of logic and creativity. And I was intuitively pulling that thread. I just didn’t know what to call it yet.

I would eventually go on to study computer science at a university, but ended up taking more art classes than technical ones. That caused some uncertainty. I had received a scholarship to study computer science, but I couldn’t ignore the pull toward creativity. And I didn’t yet know that being a UX designer was a possible career path.

The deeper I got into the technical side of things, the more I realized that pure engineering wasn’t it for me. I wanted to make things people interacted with. I wanted to understand why they make the choices they make. I didn’t know what that looked like yet, but I knew what it didn’t look like.

That’s when I met Tony Capparelli, a long-time mentor, friend, and one of the first people to encourage me to stick with the tech side of creativity. His guidance helped me land a job at a boutique marketing agency in book publishing, where I stepped into web design for the first time.

That’s where I discovered the intersection of front-end development and UI design. It was what I eventually came to understand as UX design. We were early. We pioneered the use of blogging, social media, and mobile platforms as primary marketing and audience engagement tools. That’s when it all clicked. I was designing user experiences with intention.

I spent eight years there, working my way up to Director of Design. And I would eventually go on to do experience design work for global brands like Google, Twitter, HarperCollins Publishers, and Major League Baseball

Looking back, my Associate's degree in Computer Science put me on a path few were traveling at the time. It showed me that tech needs creative types who can move comfortably in the gray space, in the ambiguity, using design thinking and human-centered design to serve as the connective tissue between engineers, stakeholders, and users.

As a design leader, this is where I am most at home.