McGraw-Hill

Our trip to McGraw-Hill today was very exciting. I felt like I was really getting a grasp of a full on media experience. It was wonderful to be walked through the process of planning and implementing a unique media project (an entire social media site), and it was very eye opening to understand that massive media ventures can happen within a company without ever seeing the public light of day. And even this internal initiative can impact profits and revenue in a dramatic way, as Edward explained to us. I am working on constructing a social media site for my Web Studio Seminar project and I was glad to be introduced to this type of product from inception to going live.

You could really tell that Edward, Patrick, and Ruth really enjoyed the work that they did for McGraw-Hill. Edward and Ruth's presentations were particularly educational and helped me understand more about interaction and usability design. The internet already exists and as they mentioned, a lot of the hard coding and engineering tech has been done so the real work now is to design an experience that is meaningful, easy to use and productive. Just listening to them present, I can imagine that their department would be a great place to intern. I was really impressed that the department really places an emphasis on usability, experience, and also teamwork (clearly, just based on the nature of the product that they are working so hard on).

I really enjoyed this trip, and would be interested to reach out to Ruth, Edward and Patrick for advice about learning user experience design and also navigating the new media career arena. I loved the idea that they encouraged leveraging of skills with the progression of digital media. I have more confidence in my ability to succeed in new media given my background in liberal arts and writing as opposed to technology or computer science.