Yishak Desta

Since I was a young boy I have always said I wanted to become an engineer although I knew nothing about the field. I just knew I liked building things. Fast forward several years, I found myself in Lafayette College pressured to chose a major and, inadvertently, a career path. With my limited knowledge of the engineering fields, I just decided to go with Electrical and Computer Engineering. As I reflect on why I chose that major, I realize it comes down to two reasons; one, it sounded really cool to say and two, it seemed like a worthwhile challenge.

Through the grace of God, I graduated with my declared major and a minor in mathematics. This then led me to a job opportunity in Johnson and Johnson as part of the Technology Leadership Development Program (TLDP). Due to my educational background I started with a tech heavy role: Cloud Automation Engineer supporting technology services. I learned a lot about the different leaders that provide cloud as a service (AWS, GCP, Azure). However, as I interacted with my colleagues and spoke to some of my mentors I started to recognize that something was missing. I could not trace the impact my work was making to the end user. Initially, I dismissed this thought and justified it by saying that I was early in my career, I do not know that much about anything yet, the impact is there even if I can not see it. These justifications, however, were not enough to satisfy my eagerness to ensure my work was impacting people (general public). This is when I realized that it is very important to me to make a direct impact on users (whether that is patients, customers, general public) and i felt as though my current career trajectory did not cater to that passion.

Therefore, I started to research the career paths that can help me leverage the technical skills I have developed educationally in Lafayette College and professionally at Johnson and Johnson but also prioritize and build around the end user. Fast forward a year of research and one-on-ones I landed on UI/UX design. The more I learned about UI/UX to more it spoke to the missing peace in fulfilling my passion to make direct impact. Thus, I started to take a bootcamp course with George Washington University to develop skills in that field. Taking this course not only confirmed my innate skills in product designing but also exposed to me how undervalued it is in a lot of technical teams.

I aim to use the technical skills I learned educationally/professionally and the product designing skills I have developed through the various projects I worked on to identify user research driven problems and collaboratively design iterable/technically feasible solutions.