A New Chapter: Building a Career I Actually Chose

There is something both terrifying and exciting about starting over when you already know who you are.

I did not come to UX design as a blank slate. I came with eighteen years of industry experience, twelve of them as the owner of Stella & June Salon, calluses on my hands, a deep understanding of what it means to build something from nothing, and a client base that trusted me with something as personal as how they looked and felt in the world. Leaving that, or more accurately, expanding beyond it, was not a decision I made lightly.

In 2024 I walked back into a university classroom for the first time in years. I sat next to students who were decades younger than me, opened a laptop, and started learning. It was humbling in the best possible way. Not because I felt behind, but because I was reminded of what it feels like to be genuinely curious about something new. That feeling is worth chasing.

What I did not expect was how much of what I already knew would follow me into this new field. The salon taught me things that no curriculum could have: how to walk into a room and immediately read what someone needs. How to hold a vision in your head while your hands do the work. How to make someone feel seen and cared for in the span of a thirty minute appointment. How to run a business, manage people, handle conflict, and show up consistently even on the days when you do not want to. Those skills do not disappear when you change industries. They come with you, and they turn out to be exactly what good design requires.

User-centered design, at its core, is about bridging the gap between what people say and what they mean. It is about listening carefully enough to understand not just the request, but the need underneath it. I have been doing that my entire career. I just did not have the vocabulary for it until now.

This year I built three projects I am genuinely proud of. Your Best Hair Day was a website that used a personalized quiz to help people find the right haircare routine, something I designed from a place of real expertise and real empathy for how overwhelming that search can be. FoodBridge was a mobile app that connected food service businesses to reduce ingredient-level waste, a project that pushed me to think about accessibility, cognitive load, and the specific needs of users in fast-paced environments. And Good Neighbor, my capstone, is a community platform designed to connect help-seekers with local volunteers, built collaboratively with a team of four across an entire semester. Each project taught me something different. Together, they taught me that I can do this.

I am looking for a team that values empathy as much as craft. A place where asking why is encouraged, where accessibility is a priority and not an afterthought, and where the work is ultimately in service of real people. I am not looking for a company that will hand me a template and ask me to fill it in. I am looking for a place where my perspective, unusual as it might be for this field, is seen as an asset rather than a liability.

Because here is the thing about coming to design from a different path: I have already proven that I can build something, sustain it, and make people feel good about being part of it. I did that for twelve years in a salon. I am ready to do it again, this time on a screen.

I am Stella DuBrava. I spent nearly two decades learning how to make people feel at home. Now I want to do that for everyone, everywhere, every time they open an app or land on a page. That feels like a career worth building.