A bit of context

I finished my Bachelor of Psychology in June 2019 and while writing this blog post I am soon to finish my Masters of Learning and Teaching Technologies, hopefully in summer 2024 🤞. “5 years !” you must say, hold on and see what I have done. Spoiler alert : I did not spend a year under the palm trees.

Research

I spent five years as a research assistant at the Brain And Learning Bavelier Lab where I designed scientific experiments in cognitive psychology as well as extracting and analyzing data. I also had the opportunity to publish scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals collaborating with international renowned researchers. With this first enriching professional experience, I knew I wanted to create online tools for making people’s life easier or analyze data in an easy way while keeping myself on the programming side. That is why I chose to pursue a Master in Learning and Teaching Technologies (link to my Masters Projects page). This will lead to a Masters thesis focusing on learning analytics where I am currently analyzing data from a museum video game (an ‘epistemic’ video game to be more precise, aka. ‘serious’ video game but this term is inaccurate for several reasons).
Rigor, critical thinking and determination are the skills I can extract from these experiences.

UX & project management

The latter curriculum allowed me to engage in real-life projects collaborating with third-parties such as Bilingo and the UNIGE FacLab. I followed user-centered design and design thinking approaches. Tools and methods used were: figma, semi-structured interviews (e.g., storytelling), customer analysis, user analysis (e.g., personas, experience maps), competitive analysis, card sorting (e.g., similarity matrices, dendrogram). I also developed my entrepreneurial mindset during the Business Concept Training run by EPFL Innovation Park where I teamed up with two other colleagues on a house retrofit project. One of the main approach to the project development was to conduct more than 30 interviews to have a clear customer segmentation for instance.
Listening to users and customers about their problems and analyzing their needs in order to find solutions or to enhance an aspect of a product is something I know I can help with in my future career.

Project-based learning & soft skills

I also experienced other aspects to projects during my Masters curriculum. First, as a student at the Computer Science School, 42 Lausanne, I experienced an immersive project-based learning curriculum – no teachers, no courses, no schedule (how does it work ?). Furthermore, I was hired as a facilitator for a project-based course “Comprendre le Numérique” at the University of Geneva during two consecutive years. The goal was to guide students on a concrete project allowing them to develop their soft skills such as teamwork, problem solving, communication, organization, critical thinking and communication. I was also given the opportunity to tutor on R and Prolific/Qualtrics, these crash courses were given by students and for students.
These experiences allowed me to be adaptive, to learn fast and to effectively switch between tasks.

Software development & data analysis

Thanks to the 42 School, I am confident in using C and C++ languages, in particular and among other projects, I wrote a sorting algorithm (insertion-sort), a shell and an IRC server. Setting up virtual machines and a Docker manually were other projects at the school. In my spare time, I enjoy attending Game Jams with friends to create video games using Unity and C# (link). At the lab, I was told to create online tasks such as the TOVA while using a JavaScript framework jspsych. In another project at the lab, I needed to visualize and analyze data using R and its statistical tools such as type-I ANOVA, correlations, t-tests (extreme group comparison). About visualization, I also dig into visual network analysis and wrote an extended explanation and a shorter blog post about it. This was the starting point of my Masters thesis where I used the same technique to tackle complexity understanding.
Acquiring hard skills is enriching, but using soft skills to bring together teams of designers/researchers and web developers/software engineers to advance on a project is more powerful (I have been involved in such a project at the lab).

What’s coming next

I am now writing my Masters thesis and continuing my journey as a master student. More projects are coming: end of the common core at the 42 school in Lausanne, the start-up I am helping with, another semester to mentor a group of student for the course “Comprendre le Numérique” and continuing my job as a researcher.

And I am still looking for an internship, so please contact me 🎉 !