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As mentioned, I'm a user experience design professional with a background is in philosophy - actually a major in Ethics, Society and Law with minors in Psychoanalytic Thought and philosophy from the University of Toronto. I have a certificate in Web Development (Design) from Centennial College in Toronto, and am finishing up a certificate in Information Design from the University of Toronto. For the sake of brevity, I tell people philosophy, since that's where half of my courses at the University of Toronto were. That either elicits one of several responses:

a) The negative one. (characterized by the typical response of "so what do you do with that?", "so you're used to saying would you like fries with that", and their derivations, etc. etc.)

b) The positive one. (characterized by a typical response of ''ohh..." (said with a knowing smile)

Why philosophy, and why do I tell you this? My undergraduate education in philosophy may seem to have nothing to do with the world of technology or design, but in fact I've come full circle. The meaning of the term 'philosophy' is the 'love of wisdom' ; one of the schools of philosophy, epistemology, concerns the study of knowledge. It explores what knowledge is, how people use it - and what it means to really 'know' information. It's a body of knowledge I apply to my work in the field of information sciences and its various disciplines. I've been privileged to gain experience in seeing how , for instance, knowledge management can make a tremendous difference to a company, its success and its employees. It's what gives me the greatest enthusiasm, and bringing technology and design to the table only add value to the work that I engage in today.

(or 'why I haven't gone to graduate school yet')

Here are a few quotes related to the education of a user experience professional that are illustrative of a few important points - namely that no school or professional educational institution today can teach you how to be a user experience designer at the graduate school level because of the three e's I introduced on the woman page:

• education: no one school teachers information architecture, interaction design, usability, user interface design, graphic and web design, business analysis (and/or some varient of requirements engineering) and complimentary fields like anthropology, sociology and information/knowledge management - in other words, no hollistic design curriculum exists for UX education.
• enthusiasm: no one school, web site, guru, company or product 'is' user experience design. No one person or thing can teach you to love designing for users and creating beautiful experiences for them - rather, it is a cumulation of personal and professional experiences, expertise and passion for design and user advocacy that will be your teacher.
• experience: no one school will teach you how to consult with users - including how to interviewing them and extract and analyze their needs, how to document those needs, and how to translate them into actionable tasks and how to deliver on those tasks for good, solid, standards-based Web and software development.

There's a lot of discussion in the user design community on these three 'e's - some of the most salient points are illustrated by the following three quotes from other design professionals:

	"There isn't agreement (though this is happily beginning to change) in the academic community about what the core elements of an interaction design curriculum might be, or how to approach the teaching of that curriculum. Art schools tend to approach interaction design as a means of personal or brand expression rather than as an   approach to solving product definition and usability problems technical departments tend to teach interaction design from the perspective of exploring and implementing technologies rather than discovering and addressing human goals. Programs that emphasize HCI techniques tend to focus on cognitive theory and user research, with less emphasis on design methods and practices (i.e., the craft of design). Many design programs still focus on tools rather than methods, but that too is changing." - Robert Reimann, Director of Design R&D, at Cooper Interaction Design - from the article "So You Want To Be An Interaction Designer"
	Adaptive Path founder Mike Kuniavsky was in the office yesterday talking about his new company ThingM and what they are up to and the interaction design trends they see in the future. After he left, I thought to myself, Man, is there is a lot I need to get cracking on. Not just the ubicomp stuff that ThingM is up to, but so much more — probably so many areas that it’s impossible for one person to know it all. (See Andy Clarke’s Super Team theory.) To really be a well-rounded interaction designer today, the set of skills is pretty enormous. Start with the four major areas/platforms for interaction design right now (mobile, web, consumer electronics, desktop software). Each of them has specialized knowledge about the platform to know and understand. And then, if you are forward-looking, you can see new platforms emerging: Ubicomp, robotics, wearables, intelligent agents. Not to even mention services and distributed interactions that span multiple platforms and environments. Then there’s the tools of the trade that span most platforms: Drawing, illustration, writing, modeling, research, public speaking. And the software to then visualize designs more fully: Adobe’s Creative Suite, Visio, OmniGraffle, Keynote or Powerpoint. (Add your tool of choice here.) Add on to all the the burden of keeping up with the latest methods and techniques, the new books, conferences, the mailing list, and the RSS Feeds, well, it’s amazing anyone can do this job at all, much less be well-rounded and deeply skilled. And yet, I still feel like I would (or should) know it all…if I was a better interaction designer. - Dan Saffer, author of 'Designing for Interactions', Sr. Interaction Designer at Adaptive Path, "If I was a better Interaction Designer"
	I've attained all of these things [ an interaction designer's unofficial education ] without user research, in the hands-on way anyway. I read and listen a lot. Studies, reports, blogs, blog comments, stories from people like my wife (who teaches computer classes), stories from bosses, developers, and so on. I also analyze click path reports, stats, etc, and I read psychology and philosophy books and articles a lot. So yes, in that sense, I do user research. In that sense, I've been studying people for a very long time. Not in the context of computer usage, but studying nonetheless. - Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of 'Designing the Obvious'from the Interaction Design Mailing List

Education. Enthusiasm. Experience. These three - and many more attributes - make up a user experience designer. They also make up...me.