Tory presenting an introduction to UX and UI design at a Knights Design Interactive workshop

Workshops & talks.

Sharing my love for UX with students and teams across my University.

The first workshop in KDI’s five-part UX curriculum, a semester-long program guiding 80+ UCF students through the end-to-end design process to build complete portfolio case studies and prepare for UX roles. I led the opening workshop on identifying and scoping a problem space, then using competitive research to uncover gaps in existing solutions.

A Figma workshop for UCF’s software engineering club, co-led with (the amazing!!) Thashin Bhuiyan. We opened with the UX process and where Figma sits in building a product, then got everyone signed up for Figma’s free education plan on their school accounts. From there the whole room built along in real time, so every student left with a first mockup of their own.

Tory walking through the Figma overview slide
Students following along on their laptops
A student building their first mockup in Figma
Tory demoing a Chickpea screen in Figma

I gave this talk to full-time developers at UCF’s Center for Distributed Learning, who build digital tools for students and faculty across the university. I walked through three foundational UX principles and how they can be applied to everyday product decisions to create more intuitive, human-centered software.

I was invited to lead a hands-on workshop for a UCF computer science class on moving from design to implementation. Students will learn Figma fundamentals by designing together in real time, explore Figma’s AI capabilities, and set up MCP with Codex to turn their designs into more accurate implementations.

The first episode of Ananya Thukral’s podcast about getting into UX. We talk through the applications that went nowhere, what I changed in my portfolio and my process, and how the Microsoft design internship finally came together.