Meet Rachel Schmitz, Senior Product Designer at RaiseMe.

How long have you been at RaiseMe? Just hit my 3 year RaiseMeversary!

Describe yourself in 280 characters or less. I’m from San Francisco and am lucky enough to still live here with my cat, Koko. I love perfecting the art of the sliced avocado, pining over the late Buster Keaton, using two rack toms when playing drums, interior design, and soft wool blankets.

What brought you to RaiseMe? I left my previous product design role to do some soul-searching and discovered how much working for a mission-driven company matters to me. Many of my closest friends are educators and I had previously worked as a designer for a preschool here in San Francisco, so RaiseMe’s mission particularly resonates with me. I’m also still paying off my student loans, so I’m reminded regularly why I do what I do. Not only is RaiseMe’s mission inspiring, but so are the people I get to work with every day.

What’s your favorite thing about working at RaiseMe? The friends I’ve made here and how our passion for the mission is the common thread that ties us all together. Everyone on the product, engineering and design teams sit together so we all collaborate constantly. There’s also a lot of cross team collaboration and friendships; you’re welcome to sit down and work in any other team’s section—they’re always happy to have you. It’s also really inspiring that so many of us continue activism in many forms outside of work. People here are very passionate about the world and communities around them.

What sort of interesting challenges have you faced at RaiseMe? Designing products for so many different users—high school students, community college students, parents, educators, college partners and more! There’s so much variety in our user journeys and in our user interviews, so there’s always something new to learn.

What’s your favorite podcast to listen to? ‘99% Invisible‘ was the first and is still my favorite. It’s about the unnoticed design and architecture that shapes our world—especially the Bay Area. I started listening to it in 2012 while studying design, so it was (and still is) really eye-opening. These days, I’m in a band with their composer, so I’ve gotten to learn what it’s like making music for episodes as they are still being written. Like with design, it’s always interesting to hear how people find balance when mixing their creative passions with deadlines.

What’s one college course that you loved? At the Academy of Art University, the class “Survey of Bay Area Architecture” was one of my favorites. The professor was an alumni favorite and we learned about the history of architectural decisions made about buildings spanning from San Francisco’s Financial District to the Oakland Hills. Did you know the Heineman building (130 Bush St.) is one of the skinniest buildings in San Francisco? It was first constructed in 1910 on a plot measuring only 20 feet wide—resulting in its need to be 10 stories tall. It produced neckties and suspenders; skinny accessories produced in one of the city’s skinniest buildings.

What’s your proudest moment at RaiseMe? It was probably when I led the redesign of the RaiseMe logo. After doing my own research, I ran an exercise with the entire company to figure out what people thought made a “good” or “bad” logo and learn what elements of existing logos stood out to them. It’s rare to be able to work with everyone at once, so it was comforting having the consensus of the entire company behind me as I set off to synthesize the takeaways into design options to pitch to senior leadership. You can read more about the whole process in my post on Medium.

Want to learn more about working at RaiseMe? Check out our jobs page!