A Design Eye in
Tech and Life
Adaptation, Belonging, Cultivation, and Design in Tech Career
Who We Are
I'm part of the Academic Innovation Support Team at Wolfram, the group behind many of Wolfram's collaborations with universities — helping instructors, advisors, and student leaders bring computational thinking into real classrooms and clubs.
— not necessarily design training — shapes a tech career.
Design, here, means noticing how things are made, how people interact with systems, and how we redesign ourselves when the context changes.
Cultivation
I studied Journalism at what I'd call a Tier-1.5 college in China — a place with good heart but not much global visibility. I spent a year as a visiting student at Columbia University, mostly inside the Political Science Department, learning computational social science before that phrase was popular.
I wasn't the smartest in the room, but I learned early that connection is design — human connection. Two professors noticed how I worked and wrote. Their letters got me into Columbia again for graduate study.
Take-away: The first bridge to any dream is not luck, it's earned attention. You design it through genuine curiosity and well-crafted work.
Designing for Difficulty
When I took my first quantitative methods class at Columbia, most political science students hated it. It was messy, mathy, uncomfortable. But I had a hunch — computation would soon change how social science published and persuaded.
I stayed, even when it hurt my GPA. I treated the pain as tuition for foresight.
Take-away: Don't optimize for smoothness. Design is friction — the good kind that polishes the material.
The Niche Path —
Data Journalism
Later, I became a teaching assistant for Columbia Journalism School's Data Journalism program.
I used to hear in my college hallways that "Columbia Journalism is unreachable." Years later, I wasn't just there — I was teaching journalists how to code and model data.
Take-away: Don't stare at the front door. Find the side entrance where your craft meets their need. Enchantment often fades when you realize expertise travels diagonally.
The Design of a Career at Wolfram
My first full-time job was at Wolfram Research.
I found it by coincidence — or maybe design disguised as coincidence. I needed to stay in the U.S., my family was under financial pressure, and I started searching for companies that valued both analysis and creativity.
I applied to Wolfram because a physicist friend once asked me to download Mathematica — the kind of random connection you later realize is foreshadowing.
Their hiring test was open-ended: thirty questions, choose any five. I treated it as a design brief. I picked across categories, added new ideas, even prototyped a swag design. Later, I actually designed stickers for our quantum outreach. No one asked — but good design begs to exist.
Take-away: Every open-ended test in life is a disguised design prompt. Show that you can see structure where others see options.
Adaptation —
Naming, Shifting, Redesigning
In five years, I moved through four managers and five focus shifts. Instead of resisting, I started designing the structure itself — naming the new initiative, shaping a new narrative: Academic Innovation Support.
I see a job like a piece of modular furniture. A stool can be a side table; a table can become a ladder if it's well built.
The key is craftsmanship: build your modules — your skills — in solid material so that you can recombine them when the room changes.
The Design Eye
A design eye is about seeing systems as editable.
You can't control the market, but you can position your niche.