Valuable Experience Working with VWEC to Redesign the Website

I am Claire Chang. My fellowship as a web designer and developer for VWEC has been a really rewarding and motivational experience during my time as a student at the University of Texas at Austin. I collaborated closely with VWEC and the RGK Center’s CONNECT program to leverage my web design skills to give VWEC’s website a new look.

Working with such compassionate and supportive people, this experience helped me achieve my goal to elevate my competency in web design and development. Because of the valuable lessons I learned during this project, I am confident that I will continue to grow and develop professionally and in my personal endeavors. Within this fellowship project, there were two distinct learning experiences that stood out to me as the most influential aspects of my development: collaboration and professional skills. 

Working closely with VR and Alyssa (from the CONNECT program) has helped me to develop the ability to collaborate in a fast-paced, dynamic, and creative environment. I have honed my ability to work together, and communicate clearly with stakeholders. Not only did my collaboration skills improved greatly, but I also developed skills in project management related to coordinating daily and weekly progress goals, to meet the desired completion timeframe.

Through iterating on design solutions, I became more proficient in many aspects of web design, including thinking strategically to deliver the website, building the content and navigation structure, defining UI components and interfaces, and providing solutions under technical limitations. After the new-looking website was published, I was so happy to hear the positive feedback from our user testing results.

This experience definitely motivates me to pursue more in this field. I would not have the knowledge or skills I have today if it were not for this fellowship project experience with VWEC and the CONNECT Program. I look forward to where my career in web design takes me in the future!