I felt stuck. I had done the typical DMV grad move, moving to Washington DC after graduating from VCU arts school.

However, I felt the design industry was disappointing in DC. I enjoyed designing digital experiences, and felt there was a lack of opportunity as well as pay. Out of curiosity, I looked up how apps like Facebook and Snapchat were designed. Seemed like such a cool job.

After googling, I learned that the role to do this job was called UX or product design, as Silicon Valley called it. However, I was still foreign to high tech, and there seemed to be this exclusive world that only the select few understood.

I figured if I surrounded myself with the right people, I’d become the average of those people. If I wanted to change who I was, I had to change my actions, which meant changing my conditions.

I looked up cities that had a thriving tech scene creating apps, narrowing down to Seattle and LA. Ultimately, no city could rival the San Francisco Bay Area. The only problem was the rent cost. 

Forums all said it was super expensive and my family thought I was crazy to use my savings to move into the most expensive city in the US. However, from my previous experience of researching DC (which is another expensive city), local rent tended to be cheaper than what the general population said online, who would often exaggerate prices.

Within a month, I found a place to live on Craigslist for $750. We exchanged driver license ID’s for verification purposes, and then I mailed them one month of rent as a deposit.  I looked up the cheapest flight on Google Flights, booked it, then hopped on a one-way ticket to San Francisco. I met up with one former classmate for dinner to catch up–that was the extent of my network, My arts school in Virginia had virtually no alumni network here. When they campaigned and hosted an event in SF, only about 10 people showed up.

I knew it was up to me to break into tech. I scoured the web for local tech events to familiarize myself with the community. I went to talks, but found a special interest in hackathons. Hackathons are essential themed app competitions where people band together to build products in a short span of time. I started to regularly book them to attend. I found that eventbrite was the best for finding gems, followed by Facebook events.

At the same time, I was studying product design on my own—reading Medium articles, books, and watching courses—while practicing my newly learned skills in hackathons. From my hackathon experience, I noticed that there wasn’t much of a tight knit design community like what software engineers had. I started a meetup for designers, and became more fluent in design.

Eventually, I won two big hackathons which allowed me to place into their incubator programs. It was essentially like working at a very early stage startup. This experience led me to consult for other earlier stage startups as well. This allowed me to get into a paid career accelerator and I met peers who had connections and got me on projects. 

After completing a few projects, I started interviewing again. I built another portfolio website. However, I wasn’t getting callbacks, and still consistently not making it past screenings.

It was only until I started reading, especially About Face and Articulating Design Decisions, that I started speaking the language of a product designer. From then on, I started making it consistently past phone screenings.

I practiced regularly with other designers on how I could improve my interview game, especially my portfolio presentations and some whiteboarding. 

Fast forward after months of rejections, I gained enough experience to land my first full time offers. I got two offers: one for senior product design at a fintech startup for a base of 155k with equity, the other at a transportation innovation startup for a base of 135k with equity.

I chose the latter because I was interested in learning how mobile sensors measured driving behavior. Fast forward to today, I’ve now had a few years of experience for product design in San Francisco.