I grew up in Scituate, Massachusetts, a small seaside town an hour south of Boston. I spent a big part of my youth as a nationally ranked fencer, before being recruited to fence at Vassar College.

After graduating from Vassar in 2010, I moved to Geneva, Switzerland to pursue a Master’s degree in International Development. While completing my Master’s, I travelled extensively throughout Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal, and became interested in ways to promote economic development through technology.

Upon graduating, I moved to San Francisco, and began interning at Kiva.org, which combined my interests in technology and international development. After interning at Kiva, I took a position as Chief of Staff at Caremessage, a Y Combinator-backed health-tech startup. As Chief of Staff, I had a wide range of responsibilities, including managing finances, HR, and grant writing.

At Caremessage, my role increasingly shifted towards finance and HR, which wasn't a direction I wanted to go, so I took a more focused fundraising roll at Samasource (now Sama). It was here, as a development associate, that I began to discover and embrace my love of design. A big part of my job was to design slide presentations and 1-pagers, which quickly became my favorite part of the job. When the staff graphic designer quit, I took on design responsibilities across the org, including designing and building the website.

After a couple years at Sama, my boss was tapped to lead our sister program Samaschool, which trained low-income people to succeed at independent work. Since she was familiar with my skills and interest in design, she offered me the role as lead instructional designer, which was a great opportunity for me to gain product experience.

In this role, I continued to design and build the website (which was featured in a Wix case study) but also built out interactive online courses, online web apps, and other tools to help low-income job seekers. As the head of our training program, I also led user research efforts, including leading focus groups, administering user surveys, and interviewing users.

Sadly, Leila Janah, the founder of Sama and Samaschool, passed away in early 2020 from a rare form of cancer, which led to the decision to shut down the Samaschool program.

In order to honor Leila’s memory, the company subsequently launched the Leila Janah Foundation, which runs an entrepreneurship competition for low-income people in Kenya and Uganda. Because of my hybrid design/fundraising background, I was brought on to help design the new brand, build a website, and support with fundraising and email marketing.

Over the course of the past year, I decided to pursue a more formal UI/UX design role, and have been formalizing my skillset through self-study. I taught myself Figma and Webflow, took the online UI bootcamp Shift/Nudge by Matt D. Smith, and read a number of foundational UI/UX texts. I'm now looking for an entry level design role where I can continue to develop my skills.

Skills

UI/UX Design (Figma)

User Research

Webflow (HTML Box Model)

Project Management

Startup experience