Armenia might not be the first destination that comes to mind when you think about a UI/UX internship, but that’s exactly where Sunni Sarkisian, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), spent her summer. With family roots in the country and a genuine curiosity about what it would be like to work in Graphic Design in a different cultural context, the junior turned what could have been just a family trip into a professional experience that perfectly matched her artistic sensibility.
It’s a long way from Arlington, Virginia, to Armenia, but Sunni, who was born in Northern Virginia, managed to navigate a few obstacles along the way, always with support from VCU, to embrace this summer opportunity. Pursuing a double major in communication arts and Graphic Design at the VCU School of the Arts, she has roots in Armenia, a Western Asian nation that was once part of the former Soviet Union. The internship, in a UI/UX designer role, took place in Gyumri, the country’s second-largest city.
The experience, though, almost didn’t happen. When financial support from her family fell through, Sunni discovered VCU’s Internship Funding Program, a program that covers costs students face when taking unpaid internships and that was absolutely essential in making the entire journey possible. Without that resource, the story would have been very different — and probably never would have been told at all.
I’m so happy I was able to have this opportunity, Sunni shared. I’m really grateful to VCU for giving me such generous support to be able to come here, to Armenia.
- A complete professional experience in a real corporate environment
- Developing hands-on skills in UI/UX using Figma and Procreate
- And the confirmation that Graphic Design was definitely the right path 🎨
But how did all of this play out in practice? What did Sunni actually do during her internship in Armenia, and what can this experience teach anyone thinking about taking their first steps in UI/UX?
From Gyumri to the World: What Working in UI/UX in Armenia Looks Like
In digital design, UI refers to the interactivity, look, and feel of a website or product, while UX is about the overall user experience when interacting with it. Sunni’s internship was at a company developing an educational website focused on teaching programming. In other words, a project with a clear purpose and a direct impact on how people learn to code.
Receive the best innovation content in your email.
All the news, tips, trends, and resources you're looking for, delivered to your inbox.
By subscribing to the newsletter, you agree to receive communications from Método Viral. We are committed to always protecting and respecting your privacy.
My job was to create the interfaces and UI for their mobile site, specifically for iPhone and iPad, Sunni explained. They wanted to make sure the site was easy to read across all formats. That focus on readability and adapting to different screen sizes is one of the pillars of good interface design, and it shows how seemingly simple decisions make all the difference in the end-user experience.
On a day-to-day basis during the internship, Sunni used the digital illustration app Procreate to sketch out the first versions of the interfaces. Then she uploaded those drafts to Figma, the cloud-based design tool, where she developed the final design. This combination of tools is pretty common among designers who move between more expressive Graphic Design and more systematic interface design, and Sunni used both effectively throughout her time there.
Gyumri isn’t Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and that makes a difference in the context of the experience. It’s a city with a very strong cultural identity, shaped by a complex history and a creative community that has been growing steadily in recent years. Working there as an interface designer wasn’t just a technical endeavor. It was also a cultural immersion that required adaptation, active listening, and sensitivity to understand the needs of an audience and a company with visual references different from what she was used to in the United States.
The Role of VCU and the Internship Funding Program
The internship also left room for Sunni to explore Gyumri, and it was precisely the financial support from VCU that helped provide a more solid foundation for her summer. One practical detail really illustrates the value of that support: although family members were willing to host her, the Wi-Fi connection at their place wasn’t exactly great.
With VCU’s funding, I was able to find a nice apartment close to my work with a connection good enough for me to work from home, Sunni shared. It might seem like a small detail, but anyone who’s tried doing digital design work knows that unstable internet can completely derail deliverables that depend on cloud-based tools like Figma.
VCU, Virginia Commonwealth University, has a solid reputation when it comes to arts and design education, and the Internship Funding Program is a direct reflection of the institution’s commitment to making sure real learning opportunities aren’t limited to students who can afford to pay for them out of pocket. The program covers costs associated with unpaid internships, such as housing and other expenses that would normally make this kind of experience inaccessible for a large number of students.
This kind of initiative matters a lot, especially in fields like Graphic Design and UI/UX, where your portfolio carries enormous weight in the hiring process and where hands-on experience tends to be worth more than any grade or certificate. When a university invests in making these kinds of opportunities possible, it’s effectively increasing its students’ real chances in the job market.
A Journey with a Few Detours to Design
Much like her trip to Armenia, Sunni’s path to VCU also had its twists and turns. She always loved drawing and, even in high school, wanted to turn it into a career. Originally, she started studying game design and production at Drexel University in Philadelphia. But life, as it often does, took a different direction than planned.
I did a graphic design internship and realized I liked that a lot more than the technical side of game production, Sunni shared. That realization inspired her to transfer to VCUarts the previous spring and officially change her major. In other words, her connection to VCU is fairly recent, but it proved to be strong — in large part thanks to the financial support for her summer in Armenia.
This internship taught me what it’s like to work in a regular nine-to-five job setting, Sunni reflected. It strengthened my professional communication skills and helped me build interpersonal relationships. Meetings with stakeholders, aligning expectations, reviewing deliverables, and the need to justify design decisions are all essential parts of any designer’s work, and she experienced all of it firsthand.
What This Experience Reveals About UI/UX and Graphic Design in Practice
One of the most interesting things about Sunni’s journey is how much it reinforces something that people working in UI/UX already know well: interface design doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every visual decision — typography, hierarchy, color, spacing, and navigation flow — is connected to a cultural context, a specific audience, and business goals that need to be understood before a single pixel hits the screen.
This kind of skill isn’t something you learn only in a classroom. You can study user research, personas, and navigation journeys, and all of that is important, but the truth is that the sensitivity to understand user behavior in a real-world context only develops with practice, with mistakes, with adjustments, and with the kind of feedback that only shows up when the product is being used by real people.
Graphic Design also took on new meaning through this process. Sunni came into the internship with a dual major that might seem conflicting to some — after all, communication arts and Graphic Design overlap but also have distinct focuses. What she discovered in practice is that this combination is actually a competitive advantage. Designers who understand visual communication in a broader sense tend to create interfaces that are more cohesive, more intentional, and more aligned with the message a brand or product wants to convey. 🚀
Cultural Roots as a Professional Differentiator
There’s an element of Sunni’s story that deserves special attention and goes beyond the technical or academic: her personal connection to Armenia. Having family roots in the country wasn’t just an emotional reason for choosing this internship destination. It was also a real advantage when it came to fitting into the local work environment and understanding cultural nuances that someone without that connection would have taken much longer to pick up on.
It’s worth noting that VCU’s Internship Funding Program is funded by a combination of university resources from the enrollment management and student success division and the school of business, along with donations from the student life and learning fund and grant funding from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. In other words, it’s a robust structure designed specifically so that stories like Sunni’s become possible.
At the end of the day, what Sunni Sarkisian’s experience leaves as a takeaway for anyone in UI/UX or Graphic Design is that the best opportunities for professional growth aren’t always in the obvious destinations. Sometimes, the right combination of personal context, institutional support — like what VCU provided — and willingness to embrace the unknown is what opens doors that no course, workshop, or certification could open on its own. 🌍
