Hello, I am Vaishnavi Mande. I hail from a historic city called Kolhapur in the state of Maharashtra in India. I was brought up in Kolhapur since the age of 3. It’s a peaceful, amiable city popular for a temple of goddess MahaLaxmi (the goddess of wealth), handmade wooden sandals and the Kolhapuri cuisine, especially spicy mutton dishes.
I completed my high school in Kolhapur and since then I have moved out for further education. I completed my bachelor’s in computer science in 2016. During my final semester, I secured an internship at a digital advertising company – PubMatic which then got converted to a full-time job – as a Software Developer in the ad-server team. My primary job was to develop monetization solutions in collaboration with the Machine Learning team. I worked on an independent project that opened gates for user-sync-ups with the Google advertising platform. I was a part of the core team to make the PubMatic platform GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant.
As an individual, my domain knowledge was growing intensely, and my personality was evolving. I was happy with my job, but somewhere I was not satisfied with it. I wanted my work to directly impact people’s lives and I wanted a way to measure that impact. So, through research, conversations with seniors, and online courses, I decided to go for HCI majors.
127 our experts are availableright now
And with this goal to make an impact in lives, I came to RIT for the HCI master’s program. Frankly, I was not aware of the extent of research in the field of accessibility until I started school here. I always considered a ramp alongside stairs to be smart and considerate way to help people and that someday, I want to develop such solutions (all-inclusive solutions). I want to contribute in the accessibility domain.
I want to graduate as User experience researcher or a usability engineer with an expertise in accessibility. Since the Spring semester, I started working as a Research Assistant for Dr. Matt Huenerfauth assisting on the project to compare the effectiveness of different methods of teaching accessibility in undergraduate computing education. I am involved in the qualitative analysis of the undergraduate student projects.
My electives are informed by my goal to become a UX professional. I took a Marketing class Buyer Behavior to understand the process of how a product reaches the audiences and if and how does the initial product research impact marketing the product. I am taking Human Centered Design Methods to gain knowledge to effectively analyze the various HCD methods. I am also taking Client Design and Development to develop a front-end developer skill set, because during my job, I played around front end but never received a formal education.
