NIA BAIJU

I have always been an artistic-tech person since I can remember. I used to dance, take part in art competitions, write stories and start novels, learn Python & MySQL and occasionally take leadership roles in group settings in high school. I was the kid who couldn't figure out what to choose to be good at because I always thought everything could always be ever so slightly improved. Whenever something art or coding related would come up in class, everyone would turn their heads and put the responsibility on me, type of situation.

I only started shifting towards UX/UI when my 12th grade IT (Information Technology) professor told us to build a Data Visualization code on Python using multiple large CSV files. Me and my partner made a code that was more than 700 lines long which worked (a miracle for a couple of struggling 12th graders at the time) but the output looked 'unorganized' which was just a gentle word for ugly. I thought "There is no way we are going to get a good grade for this" but we actually got a 100%. To my partner, this was normal. But to me, I was flabbergasted. I knew and I understood that the aim for the code was just to be able to work but it was supposed to be useable too, which a normal person could have never been able to figure out.

That's when I knew that just liking how to code or just designing wasn't enough for me, I wanted the code to have a 'pretty' outcome and I wanted it to be USEABLE of all things. 

So that's why even after studying advanced Sciences in Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics, I chose to study Interaction Design.