A Personal Statement

Wei Zhou is a girl with ordinary dreams, to be a great designer, a happy person,and to help others for greater good. I am a workaholic because I consider working is more fun than fun. But if I stop, that might because there're pretty clothes or delicious food distract me - yes, I look pretty stylish and never forget my designer identity, I'm also a creative cook. In my leisure time I love painting and drawing, being easy-going and happy.

I grew up in China. From elementary school to high School, I was a bonely, geeky and silent girl. Though not happy for many year, this dark age made me a strait A student in all subjects, since grade is the only thing that makes me confident. For better or worse, things changed, at the year of eighteen, I was enrolled into Tsinghua University, and suddenly I found myself become hot and popular and chased by boys, and the underlying script is, I didn’t really study very hard at this China’s best University, and my grade drops from the 1th place, to the 45th place out of 450 people when I graduated.

I wasted my college time on a variety of things, money-making became my priority because I eagerly wished I could paid off all my tuition as soon as I can. So I worked 18 hours/day busily for advertising and animation firms, kijo-rokkaku architecture firm, started up my own design education consulting company, followed another outsourcing software company and dealt with lots of real clients. At the same time I skipped most of my college classes. However, I think I was indeed good at exams, because I got A- all the time. I vividly remember I wrote my thesis paper right the day before the deadline, and surprisingly got the highest grade in final thesis defense. I never regret I did those things when I was young, because not only I escaped my college economic crisis, but my soul was trained to be bold. I gained lots of hands-on experiences, about life, and about design.

After graduation, I ended up with working at MSRA(Microsoft Research Asia), internet graphics group, my job was to produce 3D graphics for SIGGRAPH paper demos, XBOX Amped snowboarding game, etc., That was the best memory I have ever had because I was able to sit in between the creator of Deep Blue, and the father of Open-GL. Best researchers of the world gathered there to create next-generation user interfaces, multimedia technologies, entertainment and natural languages processing. Everybody has a high education degree in World’s best University, like MIT, CMU, or Stanford. They were positively leading the world’s computer science technology. I made my best friends ever in Microsoft UI labs people. And To be frank, though learned a lot, I considered myself as the most inexperienced person at MSRA back to that time. In order to change that situation, I decided to get a graduate degree in USA.

One year later, I was enrolled in Yale University’s graphic design program. Unfortunately that's not a UI-related program, another year passed I graduated from Yale and worked in Microsoft’s Windows shell team to develop Window’s next-generation user interface. I vividly remember my boss Dave's front door declaration" Make vista UI not suck". I was happy to visit Bill Gate's house and tried the first beta of Vista. Later I was enrolled into Carnegie Mellon University’s interaction design program, where famous designers like Ben Fry and Dan Saffer are born, and taught by great teachers like Richard Buchanan, and Hugh Dubberly.

Now I've finished Carnegie Mellon's Interaction Design program and have been working as an Art Director for Roundarch for a couple of years.

Education

Master of Interaction Design Candidate

Carnegie Mellon University

Interaction Design | 2007.8 - 2009.5

Master of Fine Arts

Yale University

Graphic Design | 2004.8-2005.5

Honers Bachelor of arts

Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Animation and Computer Graphics | 2001.8 - 2004.5

Experience

User Experience Designer, Bumptop Corp

Develop Bumptop's business realization and interface design | 2008.12 - now

Intern, Mozilla Corp

Design next-generation conceptual browser "Lifestream" | 2008.5-2008.9

User Experience Designer, Microsoft Redmond, Windows Shell team

Design and prototype window's Next-generation Windows UI design | 2005.5 - 2006.10

3D visual Designer, Microsoft Research Asia, Internet Graphics group

Working on XBOX game Amped snowboarding and SIGGRAPH | 2003.8 -2004.8

Teaching Asistant,Basic Interaction Design, Carnegie Mellon University

2008.8 - 2008.12

Web Designer, Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design

2007.8-2008.5