By IU Corps
During his time as a graduate student at IU, Shriyash volunteered with IU Corps Student Agile Response Team (START) from March to August 2021 with the Martinsville Arts Council, where he combined his passion for design with the community’s need to increase accessibility to the arts.
Shete, who currently works as a Senior UX Designer at Zscaler, earned a Master’s Degree in Human-Computer Interaction Design from Indiana University in 2021. Today, Shriyash Shete is an IU alumni and product designer with more than eight years of industry experience.
Keep reading to learn more about Shriyash and his unique START experience.
Q: Tell us about your START project.
A: I was generally looking for volunteer opportunities. I came across the IU Corps START program and saw that different departments and different schools are linked to the START program. I got a contact for Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering and it was just a nice little magic moment. I was looking for some interesting volunteer projects to apply my design skills that I learned in class.
Martinsville Arts Council is a nonprofit that promotes creativity and art in the Martinsville, Indiana community. A website design project is always a nice skill that I can apply to help the local people and communities, so I instantly said yes.
Martinsville Art Council’s overarching goal was to have a fully functional website — a single place where community people can see all the events that are upcoming, and then just basically engage in all arts and crafts related activities and form a small network within Martinsville and surrounding counties.
Q: What were some of the challenges you faced?
A: Just breaking down the larger request into clear requirements. There was a wish list of asks and there were multiple things that the client wanted, but some of them were just absolutely required functionalities. The challenge was to break those requirements down into phases and then to plan the entire six-month-long project. Also, it wasn’t just a one-off kind of solution – I also had to consider the ongoing maintenance. After my deliverable, I had to plan for how they are going to maintain it and who is going to run the website.
Q: Have you done any volunteer work since the end of your START project?
A: I have, yes. During my master’s one of my part-time jobs was working at IU’s Serve-IT Clinic. I was a graduate supervisor and UX design project manager there; I think I was leading four teams of 20-plus undergrad students and designers and developers who are working on different websites and working with different local nonprofits and delivering some technology solutions to them.
Q: How have your volunteer experiences prepared you for your future, professionally or personally?
A: Working with local nonprofits taught me a lot of real-world industry skills that are required in my day-to-day job today. It helped me hone my leadership skills, communication skills and management skills while also mentoring aspiring designers and serving the local nonprofit clients. It basically helped me to not just apply my technical skills and classroom skills to the real-world problem, but also serve the local community. For me, ultimately, it’s the people that make it wonderful and memorable, so I just like to be in the local communities and understand what problems they are having with advancements in technology and how I can help them with my knowledge to be better and do things efficiently.
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