Adaptiv People: Rajat Girhotra

What is your educational background?

I did my bachelor’s in Electronics and Communications Engineering and after that I decided to pursue a Master’s in Information and Communication Systems from the Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. I had chosen this course because I wanted to pursue higher studies, and luckily I got the opportunity to study in Germany.

Have you done any work in that field?

My first official work was my Master Thesis where I used computer vision to track people and do data fusion. I developed the algorithm for feature detection and image fusion, using Python and various libraries like Numpy and Matplotlib. Since I was good at programming by that time, I decided to expand my horizons and got an internship with a German company, where I was a part of the web development team.

After investing so much effort in engineering, what made you change your direction?

Programming professionally for me was not as exciting as I thought it would and also it never allowed me to have freedom of thought. I always knew that I care about the UX, UI and digital products, so I thought of exploring this field more, and started exploring product design as a possible career option.

Jessica Lascar explains it really well when she says that product design is “…about the entire process of creating usable products and experiences, starting by defining real people’s problems and thinking about possible solutions.” 

As a product designer, I would get to work on creating user experiences, bringing my interest in UI and Ux into use. But product design isn’t just Ux design. It involves a lot more than just that, allowing me to grow professionally….and this appealed to me.

So I started reading books and articles, and watched a lot of videos before I started practicing it. I shared my experiences online to get feedback, and before long, I got the opportunity of working as an Associate Product Designer.

Any regrets…?

Looking back at things I have no regrets, because this is who I am and this is my journey. If things hadn’t gone this way, then I don’t think I would have explored so much about myself and my skill set.