✨ Hi! Welcome to my portfolio

I'm excited you've made it here! I'm Mareike, people call me muhp [why? it's a mystery]. I'm a self-taught UX Designer, as well as a non-traditional Psychology and Computer Science student at Columbia University in New York City.

I'm obsessed with humans and their inventions
I am inspired by human interaction and carry a fascination for the Psychology behind good design. As an undergraduate researcher at Columbia, I am working towards finding out how human-computer-interaction could look like in the future. I love to fail early and learn from it, and I'm a strong believer that a fun and collaborative environment increases productivity.

Download my resume

My story

Pretty non-traditional

In the past, I took a journey throughout multiple industries, awesome teams and new countries. As an avid Sims-player, EA Games hired me to review their game design elements at 16. I then completed a media design and TV production-program at a specialized high school in Germany. After graduation, I immediately started to reverse engineer the intentions behind any product I encountered in the airline industry as an international flight attendant for Swiss International Airlines. I got to know the in's and out's of e-education when I helped companies transform their technical workforce at Udacity. I strengthened my data analytics skills and took my first attempts at coding at Amazon’s EU-wide fashion team. In the summer of 2020, my engagement with the Design at Columbia community has lead to me to the opportunity to completely re-design the startup Swapeco's desktop and mobile app. I gained a deep understanding of what drives successful products as a University Analyst for Plug&Play, where I got to see what impact good ideas (and well-researched design) has in the real world.

During my last summer, I joined Blizzard Entertainment as a UX/UI Design Intern on the Battle.net Desktop App Team. In close collaboration with Product Managers, I had the opportunity to go through the full human-centered-design process and created a prototype for a new feature in the app that increases social engagement. Most recently, I interned as a User Experience Design Intern at Google on YouTube's Channels Experience team, more about that soon!

As a co-president, I'm currently leading the 25 people core committee for student design community Design at Columbia to help making design a viable career choice for Columbia students. Next to this, I'm working closely with Prof. Lydia Chilton and Prof. Harry West on a research project about designing user-friendly artificially intelligent voice assistants.

Ask me about...

✈️ my past-life as a full-time traveller
🤦 my favorite failures and learned lessons
🎉 facts that make for good (or weird) icebreaker at parties
🤖 studies about eerie robots
🦧 primates and biological anthropology
🍰 the best cinnamon roll recipe ever
🤡 last week's Saturday Night Live episode
🎭 improv comedy

What now? Say hi!

Get in touch

Or send me a message via carrier pigeon...I'm just kidding (unless...)