Interview with Princess

An interview with Princess Empel, a member of Empathy Byte's App Team. She discusses her reasons for joining the club and some of her parting thoughts as she leaves the VIP.

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Taylor 0:03
Can you please tell us your name major year

Princess Empel 0:05
for us? Yes, I'm printing you all my full name

Taylor 0:08
you can give us your phone okay,

Princess Empel 0:09
I'm Princess Empel. I'm a computer science major. What else? Oh, I'm I'm a junior. Yes,

Taylor 0:21
he told us some of your interests, hobbies, things like that.

Princess Empel 0:25
My interest in hobbies currently, like dancing and basketball. I guess sometimes drawing and just generally like watching TV, movies. generic stuff. Yeah.

Taylor 0:43
Anything interesting recently.

Princess Empel 0:47
Not Well, coming up. Halo Halo mixer, Filipinos Association Yeah. So I'm part of like that dance group that's doing like multiple performances are like traditional and modern. So that's cool. We're rehearsing a lot. And my body is hurting but that's okay.

Taylor 1:06
Very fair. So why did you end up joining empathy bites?

Princess Empel 1:12
So with my computer science major, I kind of wanted it to like, have a big impact on people. And so the way that empathy bites works is that it helps other I'm very much like a people person. And so in my work and my interest in going into like, the tech field, is like. And it's like in within like, different like fields too, because we have like the makerspace, which is more like technical. And so that kind of gears more towards, like, technology like stem people. And then we also have a COVID Freshman, which is like very like, like a social cultural aspect. So that's kind of what got me into empathy bytes is, helping other people. Like, helping facilitate like understanding between people. And I think empathy bytes really like stands for that was the different collections that we're making I wanted to like learn how to use my skills to, like facilitate that understanding and connection between people.

Taylor 2:30
Um, what would you say makes you continue like doing empathy bytes and like staying and wanting to do more work?

Princess Empel 2:36
Yeah, I think we have pretty cool projects, like the 3d modeling and like the virtual like museum. And then like, our app is really, really cool. And I guess specifically, when I came to empathy, empathy bytes into the VIP Team, I had like no experience with like, like mobile app development. And that was something I was interested in, like learning and developing. And so when I first started, I joined the app team.

Taylor 3:37
So how many semesters Have you been a part of empathy bytes?

Princess Empel 3:41
This is my last and third semester. So I've been here for fully two, but almost three.

Taylor 3:51
What have you worked on in these past semesters?

Princess Empel 3:54
Yeah, so like, specifically my, like individual projects? Okay. So last semester I worked on I partially worked on the web team. Doing like the homepage but that's kind of been revamped. So technically, I haven't done that. I didn't do that now. But for the past, specifically for app team, I've helped like input like the 3d models, and kind of redesign the app because when I first came in the app was mostly like, they were mostly focusing on like functionality. So if the buttons worked, but not necessarily like if the buttons were, like, easy to like, read or like understand, and like, easy to navigate, like the buttons and like the lists so I kind of did that. I like revamped how we like navigated through like the collections and then like, the different interviews since we're growing as like a VIP Team. We have like many different like, mediums to, like explore the community. So we have the 3d models. We have video interviews, and then we have audio interviews. And then like at one semester, we had games, so that we kind of needed to reorganize that. So I think that's been my biggest contribution.

Taylor 5:27
So you want to make sure that like all the work that we put in is like user friendly and that it's right for people to access and understand yes,

Princess Empel 5:36

definitely user friendly. Because I mean, that's also part of like my interest is like in the UI UX field. So I want everyone to like it's like, sensible to know like how like, how the app works and like how it flows, if that makes sense.

Taylor 5:56

How do you think this will contribute to like your work in the field and how it's prepared you to work in the field and the like, UI UX sense?

Princess Empel 6:06

Yeah. I'm in the UI UX as well. I'm, I think it definitely helped. I took like a UI class last semester. And so I kind of use, like, the organization, the organization that we used in this VIP Team, and I kind of I put that into my like prototype my high fidelity prototype that I made on figma. About like, we made a figma on what is it called, like the office hours like queues? Because I know in like the College of Computing, there's a lot of like, there's like long queues. And there wasn't like a standard standardized way of like, controlling that and navigating that. And so we made that and I guess I kind of took inspiration from this VIP Team and like how we are how I planned on organizing the app and then just generally for, like, my work experience, like I would want to develop apps that are like, user friendly for people. I know like, at some point, I want to help like businesses make their own apps and like websites and so this kind of gave me insight on like, I guess like brainstorming and then like, just the whole like development process of like, making an app or a website and then like, was it like, fulfilling that, if that makes sense? Yeah. That was very long winded. Yeah, it's fine.

Taylor 7:51
Asides from skills and like the workplace, have you seen that the bytes has impacted you socially. And also academically, you partially answered that. But if there's other ways that it has impacted you academically, academically as well,

Princess Empel 8:07
um, so socially, I mean, okay, this is this is not gonna go into the interview. But like, I mean, there there have definitely been people that in this team that like, I've grown to, like know, like, Shruti. And like, Eunice from the design team. I've gotten like, we're not like friend friends. We're like, we're like good where we like say hi and stuff. And so that's just like, I'm making connections with people in the team. Whether that be just like socially or like maybe it's like work related by no like I can probably reach out to them at some point. Yeah, and then academically. I think it's really prepared me for like project like project. What am I saying project work? Because this is like a big team where it's, I'm just, I'm not just focused on myself team, especially as a team lead.

Taylor 9:39

Um, so I know you're not coming back. But are there things that you want to see be done in the future in the bytes after you're finished your work?

Princess Empel 9:49
Hmm. I definitely would like at some point for app to be like in the app store. I know that's been like a long time coming, but we've just made like so many, like restructuring. And then also it's kind of like, like financially we like it's like a little bit of a financial obstacle to put it on the App Store, especially like Ken like to have it there continually. But I definitely would like to see that on the app store because I think

Taylor 10:59
So reflecting back on your time here, is there a favorite thing that you've done so far?

Princess Empel 11:05
A favorite thing that I've done so far

Taylor 11:09 in the VIP

Princess Empel 11:11
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, this doesn't apply to like my AD team, but like, I guess I mean, I've also been working with media with you guys. So I really think the photo shoot was like one of the coolest things that we've done, because I feel like a lot of us, like we don't really get the chance to interact with like a lot of people on our team, especially since we're like in our own little sub teams.

We're like, oh, yeah, we're this up team. So I thought that was cool. And the pitchers look really cute. So yeah.

Taylor 12:22
How do you feel like that kind of team bonding would impact the work we do in the future?

Princess Empel 12:31
I definitely think it could help with like, our communication. So like, I definitely think the Georgia Tech community like would be interested in seeing our work especially like if they wanted to see like the different clubs and just like, What is going on or what has happened at Georgia Tech. I know like the GT archives would be really cool for people to see because all for a lot of people they like don't know what's there. So yeah, I think it'd be cool for the Appstore to be there. And for like our virtual like Museum and stuff to be up and running. And just for like, the masses to like use that stuff. Yeah. So I think having those kind of like bond like so. Yeah, bonding things even though it wasn't really like a bonding thing. I think it was cool because even though we're like just always working, we don't really get to like, socialize with people. And so while we're waiting for like photos, everyone was like talking and catching up. And then we kind of got that like team like I don't know, like team bonding aspect if we were like closer to each other, I think like, we'd be like, more prone to like, update each other on like, what we're doing, like, hey, like I just like did this feature or whatnot. I think it's just like, easier to interact with each other. And also, I think the flow could be nicer because then like, I think then people would be more open to like saying their ideas and like what specifically they would want to work on, rather than just like doing the things that they were assigned, if that makes sense more of like, an open space. Yeah.

Taylor 13:21
All right. So do you have any other parting thoughts, comments concerns while we wrap this up?

Princess Empel 13:27
I'm not really I definitely think overall, it's been a good experience. So yeah,

Taylor 13:55
that's great. That is our interview.