Avery learned photo editing in Adobe Lightroom, studio photography, DSLR operation, and photo presentation.

Avery created content calendars, social media posts, email campaigns in MailChimp, graphics in Canva, and flyers in Adobe Illustrator to support marketing efforts.

As a marketing manager, Avery led a team of marketing coordinators to run Forge's social media platforms. She also created content calendars and multimedia content for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Avery explored outside of the traditional marketing work and dove into user experience design in the spring of 2020. She learned best practices in UI design, mastered UX research methods, and practiced the full UX design process from start to finish. She put her knew knowledge to work on a project focused on accessibility.

Avery mastered various aspects of digital marketing, such as CRO, SEO, Google Analytics, design, and email marketing. After training, she was matched with Early Mountain Vineyards as a Digital Marketing Assistant. At Early Mountain, Avery helped the company transition to e-commerce during the pandemic and continued working part time with them throughout the school year.

Avery continued to diversify her skills and learned web app development in React.js by creating multiple mini apps. She won the within-class showcase competition!

Avery mastered various aspects of UX design, such as best practices in Figma, research methods, web and mobile design, and accessibility practice. For her internship, Avery worked with new startup, Hospitality Innovations, where she designed the mobile interface from the ground up. She continued to work with Hospitality Innovations part time during the school year and accepted a full time job offer for after graduation!

Avery is now responsible for the Impact Program where she coordinates pro-bono UX and marketing projects for CIOs and non-profits so participants can practice their skills and companies can get the help they need. Projects are focused on causes such as sustainability and DEI.

Avery was hired as our incoming Launch User Experience Design instructor for summer 2022, where she'll pass on what she's learned to 25+ new students.

Avery will be working full time as a UX/UI designer at the company she interned with through Launch, Hospitality Innovations.

Learned entrepreneurship fundamentals and worked on a several small student business projects.

Daniel expanded his skill set and learned the basics of web development, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. During this Skills Course, Daniel was first introduced to user experience design.

After completing Wireframe, Forge's web development and user experience design course, Daniel returned to help teach the same fundamental skills he had acquired to a new cohort of students.

Daniel returned to lead Wireframe the following semester and taught over 30 students. During this semester, Daniel continued to be an engaged community members and built relationships with his fellow Forge members.

After graduation, Daniel returned to teach and immersive summer version of the web development course he originally took back in 2016 with a new emphasis on user experience design. Thanks to Daniel, there is now an entire Launch track dedicated to user experience design.

The same summer, Daniel became one of the inaugural members of Forge's Elliewood Fellowship Program. Over the next year, he explored solutions for bettering college mental healthcare. Throughout the fellowship, he partnered with several mental healthcare providers throughout Charlottesville to create solutions while building his skillset in product design.

After his gap year, Daniel decided to pursue a career in design full-time. He joined the Washington Post in August of 2019 where he has worked for the past two and a half years.

Forge Alumni Councils provide over 1,000 students with access to industry experts and alumni mentors every year. Council members empower Forge students to pursue impactful careers by fostering self-discovery, confidence building, skill exploration, network building, and sense of ownership.

As a council member, Daniel mentors students one on one, provides curriculum feedback for Forge Skills Courses, reviews resumes, coaches interviewing skills, and supplies resources and support for up and coming UX designers.

Ishaan dove into data science in our Launch summer internship program. Over the course of 3 weeks, Ishaan learned tons about statistics, web scraping, machine learning, data visualizations, and much, much more. During summer training, he wrote 5 Medium articles with over 80,000 views.

Ishaan then put his new skills to work at Miller Heiman Group, a sales consulting group doing business analytics, sales modeling, and predictive analysis.

Ishaan then helped teach the same data science fundamentals he had learned to 30 new students.

Ishaan continued to expand his knowledge and skill set. Throughout the semester, he learned server-side programming and web architecture using Django, Docker, cloud deployment, command line, and more.

Ishaan spearheaded the data science course at Forge for three semesters. During that time, he created online presence and content documentation and emphasized data literacy and interpretability. He taught nearly 100 students data science fundamentals and left his mark on the data science programming here at Forge.

As the DEI Director at Forge, Ishaan is responsible for designing and launching new initiatives to support DEI at Forge alongside other student directors and the full-time team.