Recently we sat down with Computational Media PhD student Sai Maram to discuss his upcoming internship as a Qualitative Researcher at Meta. As a first year student, Sai elected to take the Serious Games Studio classes, taught by Prof. Magy Seif El-Nasr, which are cross-listed with the Serious Games MS program. The UX skills he mastered in these studio classes were key to securing this coveted internship, which hopefully leads to an impactful career in the interactive media space.
What was your educational and professional background coming into UC Santa Cruz’s Computational Media Ph.D. program?
I am currently a PhD student with Dr. Magy in the GUII Lab with the Computational Media program at UCSC. I finished my undergraduate education at Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology with a major in Computer Engineering. I had multiple internship experiences during the four-year undergraduate period. These included research internships at Georgia Tech, IISc, NIF, and Invento Robotics. After my undergraduate career, I joined Invento Robotics for nearly ten months. My role was designing software for Human-Robot Interactions for hospitals and hospitality.
Why did you choose to join Magy’s GUII Lab?
Despite being a programmer and software engineer, I always made sure my projects had tangible elements with which people could interact. This resulted in me pursing a lot of independent research in understanding how interactive visualization systems can be used to augment digital experiences. I was keen on submitting a paper of mine at PKDD (Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases). I came across Magy while she was chairing a conference workshop at PKDD. I could relate to a lot of Magy’s research interest in developing motivation models, design elements, and player modeling in Serious Games. I drew parallels between my previous work in creating engaging experiences and Magy’s work on studying and developing engaging experiences in Serious Games. This strong alignment in vision and research goals made attending the PhD program at UCSC and studying Serious Games a top choice for my graduate school.
You’ve had some interaction with the Serious Games MS program through the studio classes, GAME256 and GAME257. What has that been like?
GAME256 and GAME257 are courses offered within the Serious Games Professional MS program at UCSC. I enrolled in GAME256 since it matched my research interests in studying Player Motivation. The course was provided by my advisor, Dr. Magy, and we also had an industry mentor, Steven Goodale. Both of them had immense experience in research, game design, and game development. The course is entirely hands-on and project-based. We were in teams and were solving common goals. We had certain classes where Magy was teaching UX research methods. These classes proved to be a gold mine for the interview at Facebook since they covered a great deal of UX research fundamentals. The best part of GAME257 is we are encouraged to put the fundamentals we learned in GAME256 straight into use. For example, the course discussed personas, user interviews, and other qualitative methods. As a team, we used these methods to design, develop and deploy our game, which is currently being playtested!
Can you tell us a bit about your upcoming Summer Internship, and how your Serious Games classes helped you land the job?
The courses were great for the interview in many folds:
- GAME256 gave a solid foundation for UX research methods. Apart from a textbook perspective, due to the experience of the instructors, we had the opportunity to discuss potential practical traps. For example, how bias plays a role in User Interviews or how users behave differently while being observed (Hawthorne Effect). My first round of interviews at Meta was a technical round, where the questions were based on fundamental UX research methods. Ideally, you should be good for the first round if you paid enough attention in the GAME256 class and did some reading from the recommended reading list.
- Both GAME256 and GAME257 pushed us to use research methods and gain practical experience. I believe companies interviewing for a Qualitative Research role look into your ability to execute these research methods. For example we studied Diary Studies in class and then executed them practically to understand the lifestyle of our potential players. This was the same pattern with other methods we learning in class too.
- In both GAME256 and GAME257, the expectation was to come up with a polished and finished game that has been built after understanding your users. This required us to translate our research into a game, i.e. a product. It speaks volumes about the quality of your research if you are able to convert your research findings into a product, which is another aspect companies might value while interviewing.
What would be your dream job after you graduate from the PhD program?
For the upcoming summer, I will be interning as a Qualitative Researcher at Facebook. I hope the internship gives me an understanding of how UX research words in the industry. After that, I believe I would be in a better position to understand how I want to end up. For now, the big picture is to develop awesome interactive experiences (games, media, etc.). I see myself doing that either by staying in academia (professor) or by doing research at places that have the potential to create impact at scale.