I knew I would take this class as soon as I learned about its existence sophomore year. Every winter, I eagerly looked at my schedule and tried to squeeze it in wherever I could, but no quarters permitted me to take this class until now; I could not be more grateful. As a senior, I have reached a point in my academic career where my priorities in classes surround interest. To me, getting the most out of my Stanford education means exploring different subjects that I find interesting and taking classes that indulge my desire to learn more.
I’m currently a Design major and CS HCI coterm, but I came into Stanford planning to study Psychology, and I still carry a heavy interest in the topic. I was not sure what to expect when it finally came time to take this class, especially because I am also taking “DESIGN 262: Designing for Healthy Behaviors”. Whether the classes would have too much overlap was a concern that disappeared quickly as we were immediately introduced to the Baseline Study. I always want to be involved in more research than I am, and because of this class, I had the opportunity to do exactly that. Running the research studies, planning, recruiting, synthesizing, even butting heads about study directions was thrilling! I am really grateful for the chance to spearhead research and operate on a quick timeline like this; it made for fantastic project work during interviews, even if the product itself was not yet created.
In terms of class content, it really does not take much to make behavior change exciting; it is such an exciting subject in and of itself. It was nice to have the material from both of my behavior change classes reinforced in the other’s assignments. This class does a great job of applying material rather than ruminating too much on theory! I also really enjoyed the opportunity to connect with real people through research. As a best practice, I try to avoid using Stanford students as subjects unless I absolutely need to (that situation being that they’re specifically relevant to the project), so getting to connect with the participants with whom I spoke this quarter was incredibly rewarding. Even in interviews, we gabbed and talked about their lives in depth. At the end of the day, part of what drives me toward industry research fields or design-adjacent spheres is the fact that people seek to be seen; interviewing them for something as personal as impulse spending behaviors was one of the best ways to do this! Additionally, the product work was really interesting, especially since we developed so rapidly. I am incredibly proud of the work our team did, and I was thrilled to look at our final slides/prototype and think to myself, “Huh, I actually really need this for myself!”
When I reflect on my team experience, I have nothing but positive memories of our time working together. Group projects can be very hit or miss, but when I think about this team, it is an undeniable hit for reasons much larger than great communication and good work. Weirdly, I am so glad that I understood the kind of student I wanted to be at the beginning of this quarter. I am someone who usually takes on so much at once in a wide range of contexts that I am overwhelmed with deliverables and no stranger to turning things in at the last possible moment, even later in dire situations. Going into the quarter, I knew that I wanted to make some sort of change, even if it was small, because the way I had been living in the past few quarters (all nighters, so stressed that I cannot eat, not able to give 100% everywhere, making myself miserable from the sleep deprivation, feeling as thought I was always constantly one inconvenience from falling irreversibly behind) was so unsustainable. I knew that I had to set boundaries and stop providing options to work in group projects late at night, so I made sure to only provide morning and afternoon times in my group survey. My teammates inspired and changed me so much this quarter because they were proof that my goals were realistic; Jasmine, Cyan, and Elijah are some of the most capable students with whom I have ever had the pleasure of working. The transition was difficult initially; I took a class last minute that met from 9-5 on Friday-Sunday of Weeks 1 and 2, essentially eliminating my weekend work time at a point in the quarter where getting ahead is key. Even though I was behind in every class after these weekends, the pace of this class persisted, and working with people who were able to match it seamlessly forced me to look at the non-academic behaviors in their lives that might have bled into making them great students. I realized that they were not up late at night doing work that could be done in the morning or during daytime downtime. They were strict about eating consistently, prioritizing eating sustainable meals that eliminated the panic that comes with inconsistency; observing them made me realize that a big part of always waiting until the last minute to do work was generally waiting to do anything until I absolutely had to: eating, using the bathroom, sleeping, etc. This revelation has changed my life and my nervous system. I no longer feel the constant pressure of time because I forced myself to make gradual changes to my holistic procrastination. I no longer wait until I am thirsty to drink water, hunger to drink water, about to explode to use the bathroom, have something to say to reach out to friends or family, on the brink of hallucination to sleep. I have internalized our content on behavior change, and this is even evident in my coursework in this class! I am one of the first people in my group to ask about an assignment (although we joke that I will never beat Jasmine because, frankly, as soon as an assignment is posted, she has it done. It is the most incredible thing to witness!) and start whatever it is that we need to do. I have been submitting assignments days in advance and going to bed consistently around midnight; these are behaviors that I used to dream about but felt were impossible for me. I have always prided myself on my ability to excel at speed and scale; this is how I was able to get myself a Stanford acceptance at 16 from a regular high school and an incredibly hardworking immigrant family. However, this class and working with these people made me realize that I had accidentally built a survival mentality around school that bled into everything. I had created a spiral of needing to do xyz in order to achieve abc, and needing abc in order to do def, so on and so forth, driving me to the kind of overachievement and overcommitment that is, unfortunately, glorified in tech and academic spaces, but was slowly killing me. Survival mode for classes so easily bleeds into the need to accomplish xyz to get to step abc in extracurriculars, recruitment, every aspect of your life until you realize that you are constantly in fear of not being where you need to be or doing what you need to do.
All of this is to say that starting small and forcing myself to be proactive instead of being reactive in my portion of class deliverables bled into the rest of my life. Noticing that my portion was always the last to be done made me think to ask when my teammates worked rather than letting it make me feel badly about myself. These teammates inspired me to believe that I could take control of my own academic life and, subsequently, my own life. Even though our assignments never went in late or had poor quality, I knew that this was an opportunity to change behaviors through observation and inquiry with others. I started challenging myself to type something, literally anything, when I had down time during the day rather than taking a nap or freezing and doing nothing out of panic. I am not sure when it happened, but at some point, I was not spending the same blocks of time trying to complete an assignment that was due in a few hours. I was not sending the “just finished my part, so sorry to hold up the submission” texts. I was not freaking out about whether or not I would be able to go to bed that night. I would notice that it was 11:00pm and let myself get ready for bed. My nails were not wrecked from the panic of biting them to the point of pain anymore, and I was actually able to identify when stress was coming because I could actually notice my nails in my mouth! I have been a nail biter my entire life, but I have never been able to identify the behavior on my own. I would wake up so refreshed because I was not sleeping exhausted. At some point, I started becoming the better student and better person I have wanted to be for so long. I have so, so, so many behaviors about myself that I want to change (which I guess I subconsciously identified as I took two classes on it, lol!), but being on a team with the people with whom I work gave me the inspiration and foundation towards change that will affect the rest of my life for the better. I look at the last few weeks of the quarter, weeks that have been a tightrope walk above nervous breakdowns in past quarters, and I am so proud of the student and person I have become. I am proud of trying to be the Jasmine when she was out with food poisoning, being the one who started a couple assignments for our group as soon as we could and completing significant portions occasionally to help out my team as they did when I was behind. I am proud of the sketchnotes that I have made and the discussion posts that I have been able to make. I am proud of the number of timestamps on Canvas that have a date one, maybe even two days before the due date. I am proud of myself for seeing myself in my teammates, people who I used to wonder how they were always so happy and calm, because I was able to adjust my life in such a way that I feel the regulation in my nervous system that began simply with doing things without the threat of panic. I am not sure my team will ever know that their existence around me has changed my life for the better, but I will forever be grateful to this class for bringing them into my life.
All of this is to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this class. I apologize again for the delayed sketchnote submissions (of which I have 4, they will be submitted by the end of Week 10) and the moments where I was so swamped with work to do that I was on my laptop in class. I cannot overstate the importance of this class, and when I think about the timing of this class in my Stanford career, I am so grateful that I took it senior year with this team, this amazing CA (shoutout Angela!), and this desire and capacity for change in my life. Changes in this class that I would suggest are, thankfully, structural and slight. I would suggest more readings that have a listening capability since any reading or material with an audio component was easier for me to digest (especially on busy days), and I would suggest more spaces for justification in terms of class minutia. This class’s deliverables heavily aligned with the work we do in the d.school, so I was able to help clarify quite a bit of confusion amongst my team, but there were definitely quite a few points in which I could see how material that follows design processes and was skimmed in 147 was not fully understood by those who haven’t practiced design in depth for very long (ex. Explaining what a design system is in practice since that term was more familiar than style tile, emphasizing the importance of content design in interviewing and research materials (converting yes/no questions into how/why questions, creating convenient and efficient study materials using usability heuristics/general understanding of reducing cognitive load in computing systems (using an always-accessible google form over a google sheet is an example of this)), things like these). Additionally, there needs to be a reevaluation of how paper versus online process methods will be emphasized; there is a delicate balance between students wanting to use online methods for the ease of deliverables, needing paper methods as a learning reinforcement tool, and reflecting the very real, very evident shift in industry UX from paper-only to digital with AI-integration. Lastly, something interesting to consider would be how you might explore AI as a research partner. I had a relatively high frequency of interviews for UX Research intern roles this quarter, and across the board, companies are interested in understanding how you use AI as a research partner. We have a unique opportunity in this class to help students get ahead of the pitfalls that others will certainly encounter (ex. Not partnering with AI but instead relying on it to do all of the work), so even just a lecture about AI integration from people on research teams that are actively shifting could be interesting. I actually had a pretty long informal conversation with a researcher at Ramp about this a few days ago, so I thought it could be something interesting to consider, especially in the design of the study assignments for future iterations of the class.
Those are most of the idiosyncrasies about the class that I identified over the last few weeks! Once again, this class exceeded my already-high expectations, and I will be recommending it to anyone and everyone interested in any combination of behavior, computing, sociology, and psychology. As I hope you can tell from the length of this reflection, I would love to be part of the team that gives the gift of this class to students next year. I will definitely reach out about an interest in being a CA next year when I complete my coterm.
Thank you all for your commitment to the learning environment you created. Thank you to Angela for being such an amazing guide for our team! Lastly, thank you Christina for everything you do to make this important subject so fun to learn. I genuinely got a kick out of every nail design, every time you chatted with our table, and every time you genuinely mentioned us being on Facebook; it sparked my new conversation starter in which I ask people if they actually have a Facebook account (apparently they do…I am certainly in the minority). I hope you all have a wonderful end to your quarter!
p.s. bye nina! i hope i see you soon 🙂 woof woof!
An image of me trying to defeat a legend
Work I’m particularly proud of
