Hi, everybody. This morning I was actually ready to tape and my interviewer didn't show up, but luckily I ran into one of my old students, Mike Wojan, in the hallway and he's agreed to talk with me this morning about some of the things that he learned in my class, as well as some of the things that he wished he had learned. So good morning, Mike, and thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, I literally work across the hallway. It was funny running into you this morning. I'm happy to come chat with you. >> Great, so I want to just catch up a little bit. I know you've had a few jobs since you graduated. I was really curious about that first job, that kind of first job when you leave school and you have some knowledge, but not a lot of experience. So what did you do when you first graduated? >> Sure, so when I graduated I found a job as a User Experience Analyst for the Information Technology Services for U of M. And over there I was working on websites and mobile apps, trying to make them easier to use for their main user base on campus. >> Okay, that sounds great, pretty much what you were studying for, so that's unusual and wonderful. I was curious, and I want you to be honest here. Your teachers can't teach you everything, so I mention in web design in my lectures that you can follow along, but you don't really learn anything until you get your hands dirty. So I was curious if there were things I didn't talk about, because I know you took the class three or four years ago and things have changed since then. But when you got out there in the real world, what are things that you had to learn on your own? >> Sure, so I think what we learned in your class was how to write HTML and CSS and kind of design really well, but sort of in a vacuum, and so learning how to apply those same skills in the real world was kind of a challenge. So starting out for ITS, I realized I had to work on some systems that were pretty foreign to me, like content management systems. Since they work on these websites that impact so many users, they need something on the backend to help manage the code. So learning that was tricky, but at the end of the day I realized that the stuff going on inside that system, like the HTML and CSS that I was writing, were the same things that I learned in your class. So it wasn't too bad of a transition. Other things like accessibility are very important, especially for the University of Michigan and its users. So learning about accessibility and how to take this HTML that I was writing, the semantic code, and take it to the next level that makes it accessible by all of my users was a very interesting experience. >> Yeah, I think you took my class back before I was teaching HTML 5. And so we didn't have a lot of those semantic tags. I didn't know if now you're using header and footer and nav and just some of the other tags that we didn't have back then. So that makes me feel better that we're incorporating those now. Do you still have a personal portfolio? Absolutely, yep, so my website as it exists today is actually just an iteration of what I've built for your class for that final project. So that was really cool to have a foundation to work on and kind of turn my website into more of a portfolio showcase of the types of things I do in the industry now. And that came in especially handy when I applied for this new job because I was able to share some of my work with them before meeting them in person. >> That's good, so do you code much? Is that what you're doing, are you still coding or are you doing other things with people? You let other people do the code and you're managerial and kind of, I'm really curious what- >> Yeah. >> What you do when you leave, so. >> Yeah, so I'm still coding a little bit. I still think it's a lot of fun and it's really important to be able to have that background in programming so I can speak the same language as the developers that I worked with everyday. Mainly when I'm doing development work, it's just for kind of rapid prototyping things. I do have full-time developers that I work with that do the heavy lifting when it comes to the coding behind the scenes. But I'm out on campus, primarily, sitting down with my users and figuring out what they need from these systems that we're providing them. And then being able to come back to the office, take that feedback that I got from those users, and translate it into things that the developers can work on, that's kind of that heavy middle ground. >> Okay. Okay, so you have a new job though, right? because like I mentioned, I just ran into you in the hallway, I hadn't seen you around. What are you doing now? >> Yeah, so my first job out of school I was a User Experience Analyst. Now I'm a User Experience Designer. And the main difference there is working for this new department, the Digital Innovation Greenhouse. I'm working on tools that are much more flexible and agile and we're working on them iteratively. So I'm able to go out to campus, get this feedback and write cards for my developers to work on and we can implement things quickly, gather feedback on it and iterate on those changes. So I'm doing much more design work now, so I'm kind of picking up a lot of the visual design, the graphic design, trying to figure out which color palettes and typography and iconography works for the systems that we provide. And I think that's a new, interesting challenge for me. >> That's great. It kind of brings up something that I hear a lot when we hear about, why are so many developers men, which they are, and one of the reasons people give is I don't want to do tech because I want to be out helping people. I want to be doing things with people. But we had talked, because you originally were a political science major, correct? And you moved away. Do you feel that you get to interact with people? And are you just doing tech or do you feel you're doing more? >> Absolutely, I still do the tech stuff. I still consider myself a very technical person, but my main passion is working with people. And I think the reason I transitioned into the informatics major from the CS was because I still wanted to work with the human element and I'm most passionate about helping people solve problems with technology. And so I felt that when I was just programming full time, I really wasn't able to interact with the users like I knew that I should, and so there is some middle ground between those two fields. And I think that it's really important to be able to know what's going on behind the scenes with the code when I'm sitting across from users. Because when they give me feedback, I might know what's actually capable, kind of in the back of my head, or what we're capable of doing, what's possible, because I understand our code base. But I don't necessarily need to be heads down programming all the time, because we've got people that do that full time. >> Because who wants to be heads down programming all the time. There's times in life but not forever for me. Well, that's great. This is what I was kind of hoping for is, I'm this face on this screen that have been lecturing to everybody, and it's different when you go to there in the real world. And I don't know if you were nervous about that first job. I found that I'd done well in school but that didn't necessarily mean I knew everything. And I like to encourage people to know that when they're in tech, they're never going to know everything. But it's these basic building blocks you talked about. >> Of course, yep. It was definitely a learning curve starting that first job after school. But I just had to go in confident that I had that background that I got from classes like yours and I had the skill set. And really after a couple of months of settling into that new job, I felt like I'd really found a place for myself and proved myself, and you just gotta take what you learned in school, and start applying it. And figure figure out how you need to tweak those skill sets to fit in to different types of working environments and it's really not as bad as it sounds. >> All right, well, thank you very much. I do want to thank Mike for this kind of last minute interview. I hope you found it useful and I hope it's going to inspire you to realize that whether you want to get deeply into tech or just really at a surface level, it can help you accomplish any type of job that you're going to go into. So thank you
