My name is Kendra Scha-Fia Keitt. I’m an aspiring User Experience Designer. I grew up in St. Albans Queens in a predominantly Jamaican household. My Caribbean upbringing has shaped me and my outlook on the world around me. I decided to return to school after a long 7 year stint as a Financial Professional. I had worked as a relationship banker turned financial advisor with various well known financial institutions. Despite being married to my career, I have attended various schools studying fine art, communications, entrepreneurship, photography, and graphic design. I even used some of my transferable skills to teach myself the basics of videography and also freelanced as a videographer/ production assistant on small projects with other artists. After spending time as a banker, I found myself looking at my career as a dead end. My coworker were all middle aged and absolutely miserable with the day to day rat race to the end of each production quarter. I could always move up in the branch setting and become a branch manager, but the proverbial “buck” would stop there. This really frightened me. I also found myself abandoning my art and design roots for a work that was repetitive, mundane and over-all a hindrance to what I wanted my future to look like. I knew that I did not want to retire in finance. I always knew I was really just “passing-through”. On the brighter side of things, I learned many things about life and money that I would not have learned otherwise. I also met some very interesting people in the form of clients along the way. It was through my clients , many of them designers, programmers, and engineers, that I was able to hone in on where I wanted to place my career focus. They inadvertently helped me to re-focus the vision i had for my life. Everything is so much more clear now.
With this new focus, and career trajectory, I hope to gain new insight into the ever-changing landscape of Media Design, its functionality, and its diverse aesthetic appeal and how people and corporate entities express ideas and communicate with the world around them. Through banking, I’ve become a more effective communicator, I’ve gained new confidence, and have fostered my negotiation skills. I ultimately want to transfer these skills to the design world. I believe that City Tech is right where I need to be to make things happen. I know now that I’m finally on my way to a place where I feel I belong.
