Professional Identity & Vision

I am a designer who works at the intersection of technical functionality and aesthetic beauty, with a focus on connected experiences and the products that make them feel natural to use. Coming into year 2 I framed myself primarily as a technical product designer with a networking focus. That framing wasn't wrong, it was incomplete. What year 2 has done is widen what "designer" means to me. The technical foundation is still there and getting deeper, but the part of me that thinks about how products feel to use, how teams feel to be part of, and how a single hardware decision can cascade into a business decision is the part that has grown most.

The strongest evidence of where I sit now is what I actually carried this year. On PRISM I run the full technical stack myself, from the 3D model of the device through hardware assembly, software UI/UX, and the entire self-hosted infrastructure. I am also part of the only 5-person team in CBL3 Future Mobility, the electronics and design lead on the ion wind thruster side of CBL4 Multi-Disciplinary CBL, and a team lead trainee at Picnic, all in parallel. The team lead role specifically was earned through a competitive interview process I trained myself very harshly, including roleplay scenarios for handling conflicts between workers and also other team leads and direct work on replacing hedging language with clearer leadership phrasing. Clearing that interview alongside the rest of the load is itself evidence: I can sustain breadth without dropping the technical depth I started from.

What hasn't worked is more useful to write about. Time management was a stated weakness in year 1 and it remained a real problem through Q1 and Q2 of year 2. The improvement only landed in Q3 when dialed down to two working days at work. Two shifts during my team lead training overran badly because of my time management, both happening when I underestimated how much overhead the new team lead duties added on top of the regular employee tasks I was used to. I also failed Math and Data Analysis this year. The overload from working, training, PRISM, and two simultaneous CBLs caught up with me in exactly the subjects I most need given my stated direction into embedded systems. Both go on the retake list. The pattern is consistent: when I take on more than I can plan for, the quantitative work is what slips first, and that is the area I have to invest in across year 3 rather than route around.

One night during team lead training I was talking to my cofounder (my own startup) about how good it felt to be in the team-lead position alongside the other team leads. I described it as feeling like a pineapple, meaning the group has a tough structured exterior and a tightly integrated core, and you feel like you belong to it once you are in. I told him that when our startup grows enough to hire, I want to build a team where people feel that way, because people overperform when they feel they are part of something. This was the year-2 meta-insight for me. The shift it represents is the same one Aesthetics of Interaction taught me earlier in the year, applied to people instead of products. Year 1 me cared whether the thing worked. Year 2 me started caring how it feels, for the human inside the system, whether that human is a future user of my keyboard or a regular employee on my shifts.

In year 1 my collaboration mode was the technical contributor in functional teams, occasionally stepping into reluctant leadership when deadlines slipped. Year 2 forced three different modes at once. CBL4 - Portable Plasmas for a Better World, runs a deliberately rotating chairman and minute-taker structure so leadership distributes across the team, which is healthy. Sadly this CBL is falling apart slowly across the semester: two members are no longer responding to messages, the last submission was carried by three of us, and I escalated this to the coach during the most recent pitch session rather than continuing to absorb it quietly. The team lead role at Picnic is the most demanding mode yet, real authority with chain of command above and a team to lead below. The feedback from my supervisors has been concrete and procedural: priority order across scopes is crucial. I now think about collaboration in a fundamentally different way than I did a year ago.

Planning was reactive and week-to-week in year 1. The single goal was clearing BSA at 45 ECTS, which I did with 50. No electives, no medium-term planning, no thinking past the next assignment. Year 2 stretched the horizon to quarter-by-quarter. After clearing BSA in February I deliberately stacked Q3 and Q4 with electives chosen for alignment (Design Connected Experiences, Intelligent Interactive Systems and Design Actuated Systems) and skipped Q1 and Q2 electives that didn't fit. Taking the team lead role forced explicit work-week restructuring and the 4-day move in Q4 was a planning decision triggered by the load demanding it. The Math and Data Analysis failures are the honest signal that the planning still had blind spots and that year 3 has to build slack in rather than assume I can keep absorbing more.