Designing New Career Path Focused on Psychology and Technology
Xinyi Wei, MS’25, information systems, is integrating a background in psychology with information systems skills she is developing through the MS information systems-bridge program at Northeastern’s Seattle campus. Her goal is to develop inclusive technologies that democratize access to information.
Before joining Northeastern, Xinyi Wei, MS’25, information systems, studied applied psychology and worked as a research assistant, focusing on improving workplace performance through data analysis and behavioral frameworks.
A pivotal moment in her career came when she learned that biases in AI systems could be a factor in hiring systems. Although she did not have a technology-related degree, she wanted to find a career path that would help her address this issue.
As she assessed her education options, she learned about the MS in information systems-bridge program at Northeastern’s Seattle campus. The program is designed to equip students who hold non-technical bachelor’s degrees with the necessary skills and knowledge to enter the field of information systems.
She was drawn to the program’s structure and project-based curriculum that emphasized experiential learning. Early on, she was engaging in software development and has completed a co-op at Pandora Bio, Inc.
“The program does not just teach you how to code, it teaches you how to build solutions that matter,” Wei says.
So far, two courses have been particularly helpful to Wei—Web Design/UX Engineering, which addressed accessibility and inclusive design, and Web Development Tools/Methods, which gave her the confidence to participate in Northeastern hackathons and collaborative technology projects.
Wei credits Terri Gu, assistant co-op coordinator and assistant director of the Multidisciplinary Masters Co-op Program in Seattle, for helping her grow professionally. With Gu’s guidance, she improved her resume and strengthened her interviewing skills. For example, Wei learned how to highlight her background in psychology as a key component of her interdisciplinary skill set and a unique strength.
At Pandora Bio, Inc., which focuses on early detection and personalized mental health tools for students, Wei completed a wide range of technical assignments on projects related to the user experience. Her contributions included designing and deploying an end-to-end flow for triggering, calculating, and storing user flags; restructuring DynamoDB schemas to optimize the storage of user-flag data for future scalability; integrating the solution with AWS Amplify, a development platform, to streamline deployment; and developing functions to fetch, categorize, and calculate journal data, resolving format inconsistencies to generate accurate user-specific flags.
Wei secured her role at Pandora Bio, Inc. through NUWorks, Northeastern’s job search portal. She also found networking through LinkedIn helpful.
In addition to her co-op and courses, Wei enhanced her skillset through hackathons at Northeastern. On one occasion, she developed a web forum called Hollow, incorporating a full user authentication flow (registration/login), a blog creation and publishing system, multilingual translation functionality, and movie data analysis/visualization features. This experience motivated her to enroll in master’s-level full-stack development courses and to participate in more spontaneous coding opportunities.
Pivoting from psychology to tech came with challenges, but each project and course revealed how her interdisciplinary background creates value at the intersection of human behavior and technology systems.
Looking ahead, she aspires to develop inclusive technologies that democratize access to information—from building accessible web forums to analyzing potential AI biases.