I was born and raised in Mexico City which is the capital city of Mexico and the most populous city in North America. My native language is Spanish which is the official language in Mexico. My mother was born in Mexico and her father was a naturalized immigrant from Belgium. My dad is originally from Veracruz, a city in Mexico located in the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
I lived all my childhood and initial years of my adult life in Mexico City. Right after finishing high school, I went to college in Mexico city and I graduated from Universidad Panamericana with a major in Business Administration. The educational system in Mexico can be quite different than in other countries such as the US. In my case, I had to decide my major before I started college. As I progressed with my college studies, I became more interested in topics such as Computer Science and Industrial Engineering. I spent my last 2 years in college taking computer programming courses and courses in industrial engineering that focused on computed aided design and simulations, and research operations. During these two last years of college my career interests had shift from marketing and business administration to engineering and applied sciences. I realized then that I needed to purse further schooling in Computer Science to be able to achieve my dream career. My university in Mexico had a close influence and relationship with the Harvard Business School. Because of this relationship, I was helped by a faculty member to explore the option to do a semester or a summer at Harvard.
I chose to spend a summer school session at Harvard one year before finishing college. This was my first time traveling and living outside Mexico. This experience gave me a full new perspective about the world and what it meant to be a student in an international environment, specially in Cambridge, Massachusetts with such a rich and diverse cultural community of intellectual people from many different cultures.
I enjoyed for the first time living on a university campus far away from my family. Being able to fully focus on my studies and had the freedom to manage my time was something I learned and deeply valued. When I returned to Mexico to complete my last year of college, my perspective of the world and potential career development I could achieved had fully changed my life and my future plans for my career.
Right after college in Mexico, I went back to Harvard and pursed graduate school in Computer Science and Information Technology.
Harvard University, Charles River
While in graduate school at Harvard, I was fortunate to be part of a research project developing effective online experiences to enhance the learning experiences at the Harvard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the early years of streaming video. There was a substantial amount of development and engineering work. However, developing interaction designs, prototypes was something I enjoyed as well. This experience made me realize how important it was for me to find a balance between engineering, technology, and meaningful UX designs for people.
Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts during these years allowed me to learn deeply from people from different cultures and ideologies. The exchange of different point of views and perspectives made my time at Harvard and in the US intellectually rewarding. During this time, I also learned to value my home country more. Although I was physically far a way from family and my friends, this experience made me feel even closer to them spiritually, which was a first time and unique experience for me being in a foreign country.
After I left Harvard, I moved to San Francisco , California where I worked for different media companies as a computer engineer and Web developer. I worked at CBS Interactive developing online experiences for online content publication for different CBS Web properties. This was my first experience living in the West Coast. My first months in California were challenging as I had to adapt and make significant adjustments in my routine and social life. I realized that I had learned to be a more of an introvert person living in Boston because I was very focused with my studies and work, and people in San Francisco were more extrovert. However, the biggest challenge I faced from a cultural perspective was that San Francisco was more of a short-term orientation since the emphasis on the work culture was focused on faster results, and short term employment. Changing jobs every year or even every 4-6 months was normal and well perceived in the high tech industry in the Silicon Valley. However, the work culture in Massachusetts and in Mexico are more long term where people are expected to be persistent in their jobs staying long periods of time, at a minimum 2 years and establishing long term relationships.
Despite the short turn around of employment in San Francisco, California opened further career options for me. California is a state with many industries and with lots of technological innovations. I became interested in exploring computer animation and designing digital virtual worlds. So I joined the film industry producing digital animated films and building user interfaces for digital animation artists to manipulate and publish computer generated imagery in content management systems. My user interfaces and workflows had the purpose to collect computer generated elements as digital assets that can be reused in different movie sequences or other films.
Disney Animation Studios Production Crew
Although empirically, aiming to understand the human aspects in different computer interactions has always been an essential component of my work. For that reason, I decided to purse formal academic preparation and research in Human Centered Design at UW to continue learning proper methodologies to evaluate and understand human needs to engineer new technologies and design user experiences employing my technical skills and visual skills.
I have transitioned my role at Disney to the Disney Parks, Experiences and Products segment where I work as a Full Stack Applications Developer and UX Engineer optimizing our guests experiences employing Machine Learning (ML) frameworks and developing UX/UI applications for data visualization and Web applications.
My exposure to ML covers the integration of a deep learning framework employing the Keras library to analyze in real time photo images and video streaming captured during rides and during the guests stay at the Disney parks to produce recommendations to enhance further the guests experience with face recognition. I also work UX/UI designs mock-ups prototypes for Web based user interfaces to visualize ML recommendations and interactive data visualization dashboards. Because our development team is highly dispersed in the world, this experience has given me the opportunity to design and develop tools with people from different cultures for several Disney locations in the World.
I am currently focusing on designing UX for Global Audiences employing tools and principles I have researched and learned in the HCI program at UW such as interaction design, visual communication, information visualization and user centered design. I plan to explore and engage in projects and initiatives to design and implement technology solutions to cover gaps in Mexico my own country, and Latin America. I believe my technical and design experience in addition to my cultural background understanding Mexico can be valuable.