iXperience is passionate about creating an environment that brings about exploration, critical thinking and engagement in the classroom. We aim to challenge the traditional method of teaching and this prepares our students for the workspace. Take a look at what our students had to say about their classroom experience:

Whitney Hazard, iX Product Management ’16

whitney

"Our four-week course, led by instructor Michael Texeira, was structured in such a way that we would learn a concept, and then apply it to a real project. We were lucky enough to have a great user experience (UX) team to embark on this journey of creating a product for our vision with us. Through these processes and iterations with UX, we finally had a product idea and design that we wanted to bring to developers. On a Friday morning we pitched our idea to a room full of iOS and Web Developers in hopes that some of them would join our team. We were thrilled when we found out we had 6 passionate developers who wanted to help bring our vision to a reality! Our team was then lucky enough to be chosen to present our idea and work to the whole program on our final night."

Rob Castellanos, Web Dev ‘16

rob

 

"Interning at Aerobotics has been a really challenging yet interesting experience from day one. With zero coding knowledge beforehand, we went through a month of class flying through HTML/CSS, Javascript, API’s, frameworks and much more, but most importantly, we learned how to teach ourselves."

Matt Klein, iX Finance '16

matt"Last summer I had a great experience working in corporate finance, and this summer I got to see a completely different side of the industry. Wesley, our teacher, focused primarily on start up evaluation and taught us how to build efficient financial models to better assess investment risk. Today, I am working with a team of other iX students on a start up venture of our own. Liquid Thought, the start-up, has given me an environment to hone the skills I learned in the classroom."

Seth Schostak, iX Management Consulting ‘16

seth

"More than anything, taking the Management Consulting course at iX taught me how to creatively solve problems. At the end of the day, this is essentially what a Management Consultant does, but there are also many different hats we have to wear. Consultants have to organize and filter through loads of data, collect insights, think strategically, and even design slide decks in a visually appealing way. Working on our capstone project really came in handy for my internship at Faithful to Nature."

Jason Brill, iOS '16

jason

"During my time in Cape Town, I spent my first four weeks learning the Swift Programming Language in order to build fully functioning iOS applications. IXperience provided a hands on learning environment, where I along with my peers would directly apply what we learned from class to projects. My teachers and TA’s Julian, Alej, and Tobin were supportive and engaging, as well as incredibly knowledgable about iOS development. In the last week of the class I could confidently build my own application. Now, almost 7 weeks into the program. I can confidently build iOS applications in a industry environment, and feel confident about my abilities and skills in a workplace."

Molly Fox, iX UX Design ’16

"My first class in User Experience Design at iXperience was like a great blind date. And yes, I did just use great and blind date in the same sentence. Initially I had thought, as I’d imagine many do, that user experience design is specific to technology, applied when designing a website or an app for instance. However, after my first class I realized it can really be applied to so much more; a brand, a service, or a product. The almighty Don Norman coined the term “user experience” to encompass all aspects of one’s experience with a system, from the manual to the physical interaction. The course is set up in a way that mimics what the problem-solving process of UX design is like in the real world. From day 1, our class of 15 students wasn’t a class at all… But rather a highly esteemed design firm team contracted by iXperience. We’re learning by actually doing. In addition to our class project, we were also tasked to each individually come up with a passion project."

Yash Tekriwal, iX Data Science ‘16

"A brilliant man who has literally taught himself everything he’s teaching us leads us: known as Andrew by day and Data Wookie by night, he is accompanied by two college graduates who put the “wizard” in “data wizard”. And what unites this seemingly strange group of misfits? A search for meaning. Or at least that’s what I came up with. At its core, we all chose to do data science because we know that we live in an increasingly data driven world. Every move we make leaves a trail. Our grocery trips, early morning runs, music choices, and so much more all leave behind a trail that can be followed. And it turns out that following that trail could lead to conclusions about our manners and habits that even we couldn’t know. In an attempt to make some headway along that trail, we were given the task of designing a package for R. Our group decided to parse through Reddit comment threads, and use a sentiment analysis package to create a score to determine whether a thread had a positive or negative vibe. After hours of figuring out how to share files on git, our package finally began to function. We were a bit confused at first, because on a test run, we found that a thread about “happy dogs in the park” had an overall negative score, with the most frequent words being “weed”, “drugs”, and “anger”. Then we actually looked at the thread and realized that’s just the nature of the Reddit community – trolling. Figures. So after a trial by R, a meet and greet with SQL, and widespread confusion with Tableau, I think I can say I’m a couple of steps further along that search for meaning. If not, I’ve gained a family of 14 amazing people to help me find that meaning. At the end of the day, that’s what data science is. A quest to find meaning where it didn’t exist before."

 

Topics
education, iX Stories