My career journey has been a fascinating evolution.

I began in Hospitality, where I learned valuable skills like team work, customer service, communication, and organization. I excelled in the industry, opening numerous restaurants across the country, managed events a historical landmark venue, threw parties for politicians, and doubled the revenue for events at a struggling night club. Yet, as my career progressed, I felt a growing desire to merge my expertise in facilitating successful events with my passion for Design. That realization led me to make a career change.

In 2016, I was struck by creative lightning

I had the bright idea to pursue the launch of my own start up and left the industry that supported me my entire working career. I spent sometime in the Cannabis retail to gain insights to the products, customers, and how the businesses operated. I pitched my idea to investors, secured funding and launched Honey Forms as the vehicle for my invention. I taught myself how to use a 3-Axis CNC Mill, the CAD / CAM software to run it, designed and tested my product via “Guerrilla Focus Studies” with colleagues and peers, and ultimately grew my startup from my garage to a 1500sqft warehouse in Northglenn, Colorado.

I celebrated numerous successes, including designing and producing custom merchandising displays for local companies, being tapped as an Industry Thought Leader, being invited to speak on a Panel and giving a Keynote Address, at the CBD.io Expo in Las Vegas. Ultimately, Honey Forms failed in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. This failure was an incredible learning experience, it taught me how much goes into creating a viable product, the importance of team work, and how it takes to scale a business successfully.

With bars & restaurants locked down, and still grappling with the loss of my business, I had to pivot. I thought since I loved working with my own CNC machine that I’d do well in manufacturing. So I studied at Front Range Community college, obtaining a certificate in Intermediate CNC Machining. What initially drew me to manufacturing was my passion for creating something meaningful. My first machining job was at an Aerospace facility, where I made parts destined for Mars, but aside from that project, I realized my passion didn’t translate well to CNC operating. While the experience honed my abilities to think systematically, identify design patterns, iteratively fabricate step-by-step, and cross collaborate to complete a project, I needed something more.

A year later, I returned to school.

Technology, always fascinated me and since fabricating physical goods didn’t do it for me, I figured creating digital goods would, so I needed to learn to speak the language. After much consideration, I decided to pursue Full-Stack Web Development at The University of Denver. This was simultaneously the most difficult yet fulfilling medium I ever worked with. It was mind-blowing to bring ideas to life in code. We learned about font end development such HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, and various development stacks. I particularly enjoyed using react.JS, and establishing DBs and the relationships between data. During a 3rd Party API integration project, I spent days playing in the CSS / HTML to the interface look just right. Upon review with my instructor, I was introduced to the field of UX/UI Design. I had no idea UX was its own field.

As soon as I discovered UX

I knew it was where I wanted to be. A year after I completed the Full-Stack Dev program, I returned to DU and pursued a UI/UX Design & Research program, beginning a new chapter in my professional life.

So far, my favorite group project was Brewology, a Coffee focused E-Commerce Platform and Blog. This final project taught me how enjoyable collaborating can be when visions and talents are aligned, and really challenged us to showcase our prototyping and ideation abilities. I designed a visual metaphor to articulate the gustatory experience of consuming coffee and focused on atomic design principles and user interactions, creating dynamic components with a range of micro-interactions.