How I landed 2 paid UX internships my first year as a self-taught UX/UI designer

In my last article, I spoke high-level about my self-taught UX journey hoping to share a perspective alternate to committing to a UX bootcamp in order to break into the field.

This time I want to talk about the steps I took to apply to the job, interview for the job, and then making the most of my remote experiences as an intern.

Quick disclaimer on unpaid internships:

I don’t think it is ethical for startups to have an exchange of work and time from an intern and pay them in “equity” or “experience”. It is an unfair request especially with the economic turmoil of the pandemic on many students. Having unpaid internships isn’t inclusive of talent either. It is the students who don’t have demanding expenses like loans, rent, food, and travel that can overlook the unpaid title. On the other hand, students who are funding college and living expenses on their one simply cannot afford to work for free. This doesn’t mean they don’t have the skills and talent to make a solid contribution to the team. I know people who have worked for free part-time e and and if this is a reasonable compromise that you can work around, then maybe it is an exception.

Applying to internships (with little to 0 experience)

In the UX/UI realm, your portfolio can do a lot of the talking for you and UX/UI internships require one with an application. This is interesting to me because in many interviews, there are little to 0 questions about my degree. It is safe to say a portfolio that you can assemble in a few months is worth the 3–4 years you spend getting your Bachelors. Jarring, I know.

Portfolio checklist: (What I went off of)

• Squarespace template that I rearranged and modified a bunch to avoid being cookie cutter. Hack the template with custom CSS tutorials and GitHub for unique micro-interactions and animation on your site
• A specific and simple tag line about yourself and what you can deliver. (It is okay if you haven’t worked on a real project or had a chance to ship a product yet.)
• Flex your UI skills! This is a site custom to you. Have a theme, test out your brand look and feel. Translate this to your resume that you include as a downloadable link
• Case studies. I wanted to make mine scannable to recruiters knowing they spend on avg less than a minute scrolling through. More pictures with call outs to what a reader should look at. Bold important sentences, findings, problems, and solutions. Show the finished product up top in the header/banner. The goal is to illustrate your problem solving process.

Resume checklist:

• If you don’t have any work experience at all up to this point, it would be important to beef up your LinkedIn with certifications to make yourself credible. I’ve also seen people put the hypothetical problems they have solved in their portfolio as work experience in their resume/LinkedIn
• If you have not help UX/UI titles in the past, but have had jobs, tailor your resume to UX/UI expected responsibilities. Better yet, use words from the job posting in your resume.

EX: Health care tech company has “Research industry and evaluate competitive products to help inform product strategy” as a bullet on their ad. Resume application(assuming you’ve worked at a restaurant before): “Performed a competitive analysis on fast casual restaurants and reported back to manager a variety of options to add as new menu items.”

Interview Prep (Yay! They’re interested)

Yes, you scored an interview with a company who wants to take a risk on paying a college student with little to no experience. It is important to empathize with a business POV to better sell your pitch in the following interviews.

The businesses recognizes you are fresh talent with little professional experience in the tech world at the moment. BUT, they like your resume and feel your portfolio is very promising and shows a thoughtful problem-solving process.

Phone screen checklist (Quick 15–30 minute personality gauge moderated by an HR recruiter) :

• Prepare a script for the basic behavioral questions they might ask here. I recommend watching Common UX Designer Interview Questions and ALWAYS have 3 questions prepared to ask the interviewer. The ending questions should be unique and specific to the business to show you did the due diligence in researching the product, company initiatives, and niche they are competing in.
• A safe bet is to have an answer to “Why work for XYZ company?”. If they couldn’t tell you didn’t do the research before, this question is sure to call your bluff.

Interview prep checklist (45 min-1hr interview with UX/UI design team):

• I always remember the STAR approach to answering behavioral questions. A compliment I received in 1 of my interviews was that I answered the questions concisely. Some people spend too much time giving context that they dilute the answer of how they overcame a challenge, if they end up arriving there at all.

Situation

Task

Action

Result

• Presenting your portfolio to other UX designers can be intimidating and definitely nerve racking. I was beyond nervous doing this for the first time and actually did not expect to be presenting 😅. (I managed to wing it and wing it well) My advice is to practice presenting beforehand and time it. I think a safe spot to land between is 8–10 minutes for a case study. This can help you decide what is fluff in your case study as you don’t want to skip over any content, but summarize what is in that section.
• Do not read word for word what is typed in your portfolio. The designers could read it themselves if they wanted to. You are there to serve as a lively presenter who can communicate briefly the steps went to tackle a problem. The interviewers will appreciate confidence, passion for solving the problem, and a shown desire to improve on the latest of your prototype.

Offer accepted (Congratulations! You showed you are eager to learn, be teachable, and confident to begin a new challenge)

Hearing over the phone that you have an offer is a great ego boost and a bit validating to the hard work you put in up to this point.

My internships have been remote so far so I had to learn how to adapt to this work environment. It is normal to feel lost, disconnected to the team, and an extra curiosity to what everyone else on the team is doing right now.

To make my internships worthwhile I made sure to grab individual time with my team members and cross functional teams to introduce myself and ask relevant questions to get to know their role better. So, talk to devs to understand how they like to collab with designers. Talk to PMS to understand how they mediate between devs, designers, and business goals. And obviously talk to designers to understand how they solve problems, prototype, understand the qualifications of a product, conduct user research.

It should definitely be an end goal to secure a project the internship gave you where you exhibited solving a problem but this time in the context of real business constraints and viability. This project should be highlighted on your portfolio for future job prospects.

All in all

This is an iterative process and what I did that helped me get my 2 paid UX design internships within my first year of the self-taught route. I hope this can help someone land their internship to hit the ground running with!