In this episode of the Anthro to UX podcast, Amy Santee speaks with Matt Artz about her UX journey. Amy earned a MA in Applied Anthropology from the University of Memphis. After school, she worked in UX for a decade at companies like eBay and is now a UX career coach.About Amy SanteeAmy Santee is a loud and proud career coach for current and aspiring user experience and technology professionals. From professional branding and confidence building, to job search strategy and interviewing, she works with clients to create a strategy to achieve career goals through an iterative process of exploring, learning, testing, and refining. Recommended Links

• Amy's Website
• Amy on LinkedIn
• Anthropologizing.com

Episode TranscriptPlease note this transcript is an automated transcription and may have some errors.

Matt Artz: [00:00:00] Today, I'm with Amy Santee, a former UXR or transitioning out of UX, but with lots of UX experience now turning into a UX career coach. And so we're going to have a great conversation about, not only Amy's experience working in UX, but also all of her recommendations of how you might be able to transition into UX.

[00:00:20] And you've worked in companies such as eBay. You have run your own business. Now you're really starting up. Sort of second version of your business, if you will. So you have a lot of broad experience. You want to maybe talk a little bit about that, what first brought you to anthropology?

[00:00:36] How did you maybe find your way to UX? Give us a little overview.

[00:00:39] Amy Santee: [00:00:39] Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me on your show. I'm really excited to be here. So yeah, again, my name's Amy Santee and I use she, her pronouns. And I live in Portland, Oregon. How I got into anthropology. It has a really long history.

[00:00:53]I knew it as early as age 14 or 15 that I wanted to be an anthropologist and that's because of a computer game I played where in the game I met Dennis. Ethnobotanist on the Amazon trail. That was the name of the game actually. And I just got really curious about ethnobotany and then I, found that was a subdiscipline of anthropology and I got broader and broader The first book I picked up at borders.

[00:01:17]I don't know if you remember that store, but it was Napoleon Shannon's book about being in the Amazon rainforest with different tribes. And I know that's actually a controversial book now. But I didn't know that back then, I was just kinda like exploring what was anthropology all about. And I did end up going to get my bachelor's in anthropology, as well as my master's and.

[00:01:41] Initially I had that kind of basic simplified understanding of anthropology as studying other cultures and like going off and traveling the world. And, as we know, that's not a, that's really only a slice of what doing anthropology could look like. And so throughout my education especially into my master's degree, which I got at the university of Memphis in 2011.

[00:02:04]My, my world expanded, or my view of anthropology expanded to encompass basically answering questions and solving problems that relate to human beings in any place on any topic. And yeah. My program at Memphis was an applied anthropology program. And so we took I took a lot of courses on applied anthropology and the realms of let's say education, healthcare urban development Basically the main topics that you might find in an anthropology program?

[00:02:34] I did take a consumer research course when I was there as well, whic