Interaction Design Research (INFO-I 345)
research has a method. that was new to me. formulate, observe, test, revise, document. it looked a lot like the sandwich.
Sophomore Year
2024 to 2025
the year i started explaining things to other people and realized that's when i actually understood them.
Theoria (Learning)
HCI Design and Programming (INFO-I 300)
interfaces are behavioral algorithms. every click is an instruction. every confusion is a missing step.
Mathematical Foundations of Informatics (INFO-I 201)
mathematics gave me vocabulary for things i was already doing intuitively. naming something makes it repeatable.
Mentorship Praxis (People Supported)
i started mentoring this year and something unexpected happened -
explaining my process to someone else made me realize which parts of it i didn't actually understand yet.
the gaps in my teaching were the gaps in my thinking.
that's still how i check my own work.
Praxis (Method in Practice)
ServeIT Internship Continues
i started owning more of the process instead of just tasks. i wrote earlier checkpoints so problems showed up before they got expensive.
First-Gen Undergraduate Research
i learned to stay with the loop: define the problem, collect evidence, test alternatives, iterate. slower at first, cleaner in the end.
Opus (Work)
2025
the mentorship template
a repeatable framework for taking someone from confused to clear.
the problem
i was doing the same thing every time i helped someone. taking a vague panicked prompt and turning it into executable steps. but i was doing it from memory, which meant it varied.
the decision
write it down. make it repeatable. turn a conversation into a framework someone else could run.
the result
peers left sessions with a specific next three steps, not general advice. follow-up showed they actually used them.
if i built it again
i'd document the cases where it didn't work too. the failures are more instructive than the successes.
Theoria et Praxis (Theory and Practice)
sophomore year taught me that a good method isn't just something you use yourself.
it's something you can hand to someone else and they can run it without you in the room.
that became the standard for everything.