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Home > People > Alumni Profiles > Spotlight
SI SpotlightNabeeha Mohammed (MSI '05)
"I was drawn to SI not only because it had top-notch programs and brilliant professors, but also because it was just small enough that students got the right kind/amount of attention and just large enough to provide a diverse and balanced community."
E-mail Nabeeha
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Before SI: Nabeeha earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from Lawrence University.
At SI: While at SI, Nabeeha took advantage of the opportunities available to her, including the project work that all students participate in.
"There are several SI projects that stick out in my mind; I continuously draw on those experiences even today. My project with a local Ann Arbor school for SI 501: 'Use of Information' was definitely a great learning experience on teamwork and working with clients. I certainly have leveraged the learnings from that project on many occasions.
"I had a blast working with my team to create a visualization tool for the Fantasy Football draft procedure for my SI 649: 'Information Visualization' class. Going through the process of understanding the space and our target users and driving our findings into an actual working prototype was absolutely exciting."
Another significant experience came from taking SI 622: "Evaluation of Systems and Services."
"My team got to evaluate a 'real-world' product for a 'real-life' client, much like I have had to do for my job. It was great to be able to put into practice all the methodologies we were learning in class as we learned them, and to be able to interact with an 'outside' company that was looking to us for user feedback and recommendations," she says.
"I came away utterly saturated with knowledge about user research tools and techniques and was definitely able to give coherent examples and explanations when it came time to interview for my internship and my job.
Nabeeha notes her internship with Microsoft turned out to be an "amazing and gratifying experience" and positioned her well for full-time employment after graduation.
"It was sort of the final step to my initiation into the world of user experience research," she says. "I got to completely integrate with a team of talented professionals who mentored me and enabled me to apply and build on what I learned at SI. I learned so much from working on these and other projects about information science/human-computer interaction, about myself, and about working with other people. It was never easy, but I gained great insights, great practical experience, and always made a new set of friends from whom I learned so much."
After SI: Now a user experience researcher at Microsoft Corp. Nabeeha says her education at SI definitely was noticed during her job search.
"My experiences at SI were always the most significant discussion points in all my interviews," she says. "From SI I acquired an in-depth understanding of HCI. I learned how to 'learn' about the field, and I learned how to 'sell' what I knew and could do. I felt almost over-prepared for some aspects of my job, when I first started. I didn't know everything, but I had a great foundation, which gave me an extremely strong start."
Nabeeha notes that SI students also benefit through connections elsewhere at the University of Michigan.
"Through my work as a supplemental instructor for the Minority Engineering Program, as a programmer for the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work, and as a usability trainee at the USE Lab, I got to explore and meet diverse sets of people from the larger U-M community," she adds.
"Being able to help and interact with so many people with such a wide range of interests added 'spice' to my life and helped me maintain a good school/work/life balance."
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