Saying “yes” to opportunities, from studying abroad to photoshopping his head to a piece of corn, is something John Robb has learned to do throughout his college career.

Robb decided to say “yes” to running for homecoming king; it was an opportunity to have some fun during his last semester at Pace, to “step out of his comfort zone,” to make fun of the contest itself.

Last Saturday, Robb won the title of homecoming king.

“It boils down to a popularity contest, and it’s stupid that someone can win $500 for a popularity contest,” Robb, a native of New Paltz, New York, said. “I ran to make fun of it.”

Robb, a senior communications major and co-author of a scholarly article on mobile app design, won the homecoming contest by photoshopping himself into scenes filled with vegetables.
His vegetable, pun-filled campaign began over the summer, when he came up with poster ideas just to make people laugh. Robb then decided to actually use the jokes as a real campaign; he spent hours on Photoshop to make the flyers.

“I’ve known Photoshop since tenth grade,” Robb said. “I’ve used it numerous times as the public relations manager for WPAW.”

Robb’s technological and design skills go beyond Photoshop. His career goal is to run his own development and design firm. He established this goal after taking advantage of the opportunities available to him to enhance his knowledge of user experience design during his time at Pace.

User experience design, basically, is enhancing the usability of a certain product. In Robb’s case, the product is usually some sort of mobile app.

“I first discovered that I like user experience design when I entered the Pace Pitch contest freshman year,” Robb said. “We (he and his team) won the Barcelona Mobile International Congress’s mobile app development competition in 2012.”

Robb would later take on two internships where he worked closely with mobile app design teams. He also continues to work on a series of mobile apps with the mobile app team at Pace. One of the apps they worked on was presented at Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conference.

While working on the app, Robb and his team co-authored a scholarly article called Alive Inside: Developing Mobile Apps for the Cognitively Impaired. In the article, Robb wrote about the effect of application design on both older and younger generations.

Robb used all resources available to him through Pace to gain more expertise in his subject. He learned to say “yes” to all opportunities presented to him despite the fact that none of the professors on the Pleasantville campus teach user experience design.

“It’s not what resources you have available, it’s how you use them,” Robb said.

When he’s not working on app development and user experience design, Robb can be found playing music. He plays the banjo, guitar, piano, and “a little bit of alto sax.”

“I like playing music because I don’t understand it,” Robb said after beat boxing into a glass. “You feel emotions from music and you don’t completely understand why.”

Robb does understand that he must leave Pace, even though he has enjoyed his time here and will miss it. He believes that it will be more beneficial for him to go somewhere else for graduate school, considering Pace does not have a program specific to user experience design.

“I don’t think I’ll ever go to another place where I’ll be as well liked by as many people as here, and I say that gratefully,” Robb said.