Alfonso Gómez-Arzola: My name is Alfonso Gómez-Arzola. I am a web developer, designer, and partner at Small Batch.

I never went to school for design but I had the good fortune of knowing a few designers that I really just came over to them like, "I like your work, I would like to work with you". And some of the advantages I think your students will have is the years and years of experience that your faculty and facilitators are bringing to their education. The fact that these are real working professionals, they didn't study education and study UX to immediately go and teach UX.

Having tried to learn on my own and then also having done some sort of, I guess you could call apprenticeship under designers, I can say that it is invaluable to have someone who knows the craft, who doesn't necessarily know all the answers, but knows where to look. Knows how to look. Knows what they don't know and how to identify what they don't know.

Your program versus learning design on your own has some advantages. For example, the real-world projects again. The fact that you're having real companies with real problems that need to get solved coming to the students and working with them. And then there's also the fact that you are going into the business of UX. Which the business of the web in general is very hard. It's very difficult and learning on your own is very, very painful and very long.

I'm looking forward to not having to design anymore and being able to let people more talented than I really to take the helm and allow them to think in ways that I just can't think anymore. just because they're of a different generation. They have grown up with way more technology than I have. So I really look forward to that. I look forward to a more well-rounded, educated UX professional and designer.

I would have loved to have had this opportunity when I was in my twenties.