[image1-right]Jennifer Borchardt built on a strong background in user experience design and strategy with a master’s degree from GSLIS. Now Borchardt is a VP at a major bank and speaks professionally to peer groups and graduate students.
Where do you work and what is your role?
I am a group lead and vice president in the online customer experience team at Wells Fargo, one of the largest banks in the United States. My team designs Wells Fargo's customer-facing web sites and applications for mobile and tablet devices. My work is an exciting intersection of creative, technical, and business. My professional background is in user experience design and strategy. I have worked at Wells Fargo for nine years and have been in this field for almost eighteen years. I am based in San Francisco, but frequently travel around the U.S. for work. I was previously a lead for an international trading firm; I lived and worked throughout Europe for six years and managed creative and technical teams in fourteen countries.
What do you like best about your job?
The number one reason why I love coming to work each day is the people with whom I work. I have an exceptionally talented team and outstanding leaders who consistently challenge me. Working in a large financial institution isn't for everyone, but it's perfect for me. I really enjoy the structure and order of everything as well as the regulations and challenges of working within them. I also get to specialize and become an expert in a growing field. I am very passionate about what I do: help people make better financial decisions. I feel incredibly fortunate to be doing this work and to be able to go all of the places in the world this work has taken me.
How did GSLIS help you get to where you are today?
Illinois’s library and information science program is widely respected, so being a graduate has definitely opened a lot of doors for me personally and professionally. Immediately upon completing my graduate studies, I was offered a much larger strategic leadership role at Wells Fargo. Soon afterwards, I was invited to work with some leading graduate programs, including MIT and Stanford. My Illinois connection also gave me the opportunity to get speaking engagements with several respected technology companies and professional organizations.
The business and computer science courses I took at GSLIS were hugely valuable. The courses that were most beneficial and directly applicable to my career were Yoo-Seong Song's Information Consulting and Catherine Blake's Introduction to Databases. They were among the most challenging classes I have ever taken and gave me extremely valuable technical and professional skills. Studying at GSLIS was a great opportunity for me because it allowed me to continue working and stay current in a rapidly advancing field while getting a top-notch graduate education. I was able to immediately apply my professional experience to my studies and vice versa, which helped both tremendously.
What advice would you like to share with GSLIS students?
Be creative; creative in how you approach your GSLIS education and how you apply what you've learned to your professional pursuits. Library and information science is one of the most versatile areas of study. The skills learned in this program can be applied to a variety of fields—business, education, technology, finance, and science to name just a few. The only limitation is how you decide to use these skills and market yourself to potential employers.
Networking is also hugely important. Develop productive relationships with your professors and fellow students; if you're in the LEEP program, many of these students are already accomplished professionals so take extra care to connect with them, particularly if they are working in a field that interests you. If you have a class project that enables you to work with an outside company, it's well worth the effort to cultivate a relationship with the company's representative. Professors can often help with that. Also, don't forget to reach out to the Illinois alumni network. Informational interviews and emails can sometimes lead to a great job, given enough time and the right kind of effort.
In short, don't be shy about creatively (yet honestly) marketing yourself as having the valuable skills you're learning in GSLIS!
What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I am fortunate to have a job that gives me a lot of vacation time, so I travel around the world for scuba diving and cycling trips. The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the best places anywhere for cycling so I do a lot of riding here, too. I participate in about a dozen races and long-distance cycling events per year, including an annual ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. I also spend a lot of time working on my house and, like many GSLIS students, doting on my cats.
What’s next for you?
Professionally, I am evolving the user experience practice at Wells Fargo and growing my team of talented designers and user experience experts. I am also doing more professional speaking events and guest lecturing at graduate programs. I would love to be a guest speaker in a GSLIS class. Personally, I want to continue traveling and am planning to visit five new countries this year. Someday in the not too distant future, I would love to apply what I learned in GSLIS to help build libraries and learning centers in a developing country.