Rushabh Bhatt
MS HCI Candidate, Drexel University · Philadelphia, PA
From an electronics diploma to human-computer interaction research, one role at a time.
It started with an obsession, not with design, but with circuits. I wanted to take apart every device I touched and understand what was humming inside. The diploma wasn't a career plan; it was me chasing curiosity down a rabbit hole. What I found at the bottom surprised me: the hardware was fascinating, but the thing that truly floored me was the invisible layer where humans and machines actually meet.
Knowing how it worked wasn't enough. I needed to know it completely.
So I went all in. Four more years, deeper into signal processing, embedded systems, the architecture underneath the screen. I got good at it. But somewhere in year three, a quiet question started following me around: why is this so hard for people to use? I'd cracked the technical side. What I hadn't cracked yet was the human side. And I couldn't stop thinking about it.
That question had a name. I just didn't know it yet.
UX. I'd barely heard the word before Zeus Learning handed me the chance to explore it. I walked in knowing almost nothing: no design process, no research methods, no real understanding of what accessibility meant in practice. Over the next year, I built everything from scratch: wireframes, usability tests, interaction patterns, design systems. It was the first time I understood there's an entire science dedicated to making things easier for people. I was completely hooked.
But learning it and actually doing it are two very different things.
At Magadh Tech I got real ownership for the first time: leading a full redesign of an internal employee portal, with no senior designer above me. Just me, my users, and a problem to solve. And it humbled me fast. The decisions I thought would be obvious weren't. The research I thought I could wing was harder than I expected. That project didn't break my confidence; it revealed something more honest: there were fundamentals I hadn't learned, and they mattered more than I'd realized.
There's only one thing to do when you hit a ceiling: find a higher room.
Drexel did something no job had managed: it showed me how much I didn't know, and I mean that as a compliment. In the first semester alone, I encountered more research frameworks than I'd seen in two years of working. The Nielsen Norman Group went from a name I vaguely recognized to a foundation I built my thinking on. I learned to run usability studies that actually held up, to think about cognition before pixels, to argue for design decisions with evidence instead of instinct. It reordered everything.
And while I was rebuilding how I think about design, a side door opened.
A graphic design internship at CSL Behring wasn't in the plan, but it taught me something I needed to hear. The visual problem-solving, the empathy behind composition, the craft of making something feel right, all of it borrowed from the same toolkit as UX. But somewhere between the brand guidelines and the poster layouts, something also clicked clearly: this wasn't my lane. I was a UX designer who now understood visual communication well enough to never have to guess at it again. That's a different kind of valuable.
Ten years of learning. Now it's time to build.