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. It sharpened something I already knew: the craft instincts behind a good layout and the craft instincts behind a good user flow come from the same place. I came out of it a UX/Product Designer with visual fluency most designers have to work harder to build. That's a different kind of valuable.
Ten years of learning. Now it's time to build.