From the beginning of September 2022 until the end of August 2023, I am on maternity leave. While I am not yet a parent (still waiting), I have already logged off/passed my duties at work and completed ongoing academic commitments from postdoc times. I do not commit to any mentoring or academic activities until the end of February 2023.
Since May, I work as a Qualitative UX Researcher at WhatsApp, and I wanted to share my interview experience and the resources I found useful during the preparation.
I work as a postdoc, but how did I come to this? How does one become a postdoc? Here is the second part of the answer to this question; please, see the first part here: How does one become a postdoc? My story (part 1). Towards the end of the PhD, everyone starts thinking of “what’s next”. There are different paths one can take after adding a Dr to their title. In computer science, you are often asked whether you want to stay in academia or switch to industry…
I am a postdoc in human-computer interaction and digital health, but how did I come to this? How does one become a postdoc?
Short answer: "You get your PhD and stay to work in academia," but here is my long(er) answer. I share it to show that a path leading to academic research in human-computer interaction (HCI) can be very different, and mine wasn’t straight and smooth.
Since March 2020, I started thinking of what happens after my current postdoc position at Trinity College Dublin. I want to share my search experience and reasoning to reveal what happens before social media messages, starting with "I am happy to announce that I join...". For me, it was a long and tiring process, complicated by the pandemic and almost an existential crisis and re-evaluation of life priorities that it caused.
The recent shift of academic (and not only) life into digital space due to lockdown and social distancing removed lots of important things from us, such as meeting colleagues face-to-face and going on conferences, but also made participation easier in some way. One of the drawbacks of that is the fear of missing out, as there is a large number of interesting online events on the topics of digital health, security and privacy, and human-computer interaction that seem to happen almost every day.
