Writing became the central thread of my interests in high school. I dove into creative writing courses at Carnegie Mellon and soon decided to add a second major in Professional Writing.

As I explored the many avenues of a writing degree, various internships led me to a summer at a mobile app development company as a marketing intern. Near the end of my time there, a UX designer approached me for help writing UI text for his designs, and realized that I didn’t want to write about the product—I want to help make it.

I spent a 5th year at CMU exploring more of the design and technical sides to a career in words and earned my MA in Professional Writing. By then, I was interviewing for a career in technical writing and moved back to the Bay Area in 2015.

My tech writing career spanned many product areas and scrum teams, including becoming one of two founding members of a tech writing team for a new small-business product. But as much as I enjoyed tinkering with documentation in XML, I also had a knack for product design, and so Content Design was a natural fit as soon as the company began to adopt the role.

My experiences in writing and editing UI text across many sides of the company gave me a superpower of synthesis, where I can look at a mock-up and compare it to an encyclopedia of thousands of others. My brain loves to identify and create patterns in content: where it’s shown, what element to show it in, and, most importantly, when to remove it.

Plus, nothing makes you want to work on the UX side of the product more than spending seven years explaining to people how to use it!