THOMPSON DRAPER
This page is, as it is titled, all about me! I want to showcase elements of myself here that give a glimpse into my life, my passions, and my accomplishments. I hope you like what you see, and potentially can find something that we share an interest in.
COVER LETTER
Ever since I was a kid, I loved the process of designing. Whether it was working on a craft, playing with Lincoln logs, or even free building with Legos, I had a knack for designing and it was something I wanted to do with all my free time. The days of aimlessly building and creating designs may be a fragment of my past, but their foundations and the joy they provide me still reside within the work I do to this day.
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This fascination with design led me towards architecture when I arrived at my orientation freshman year of college. The field was one that combined both the artistic and the arithmetic sides of my brain, and it felt like the perfect fit for what I loved to do and what I knew how to do well, math. The path that I chose for university, I thought for a while, set me down a slim tunnel for my career options. The work that I was doing within my major was unlike anything related to any other students at my school, but I loved it, so it posed no issues to me.
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Getting to utilize software to create beautifully abstract works of art for homework was my favorite thing to ever get to do, but I had a bit of a rude awakening when it came to my actual experience working in the field. The designing and problem-solving aspects of everything I grew to love were not once experienced, and it made me question if that is truly what I wanted to spend my life doing.
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This realization within my field was something that I spent a lot of time thinking over, which eventually led me down a path towards user experience design. The foundations of the field were eerily similar to that of architectural design, which opened my eyes to the relationships between all aspects of design. I signed myself up for the Google UX Design Professional Certificate through Coursera and found an abundance of pleasure and fulfillment through the work they had me doing, which contrary to my architectural coursework, felt truly relevant to the work I would be doing in real life.
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The foundational elements of design that I learned at university and am continuing to learn made a huge difference in the way that I think about design, and I am very grateful that that is the path I took myself down. The lessons taught through architecture are some that I see and feel in a plethora of scenarios, and the adaptation of them to the foundations I learned through Coursera aid in creating a holistic approach to any design problem.
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