The UI/UX internship that Sunni Sarkisian completed in Armenia wasn’t exactly a straight line from point A to point B.
From Arlington, Virginia, to Gyumri, Armenia’s second-largest city, the distance is significant, and the path to getting there came with its own set of challenges along the way.
But with financial support from VCU, Virginia Commonwealth University, Sunni was able to turn what could have stayed just a plan into a real, hands-on experience full of personal meaning.
After all, Armenia wasn’t just a work destination for Sunni.
It was also a return to his roots. 🌍
A third-year student double-majoring in communication arts and graphic design at VCU’s School of the Arts, Sunni is originally from northern Virginia but has family roots in Armenia, a West Asian nation that was once part of the Soviet Union. It was in this setting — between mobile interfaces, design tools, and the streets of Gyumri to explore — that he spent the summer putting everything he’d been learning at university into practice, in an internship that ended up solidifying the career direction he wanted to pursue.
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When an internship and personal history collide
Growing up hearing stories about Armenia is one thing. Setting foot in the country, working there, living alongside its people, and understanding the culture from the inside out is a completely different experience. For Sunni, this internship carried a dual weight: it was professional and personal at the same time, and that combination made the experience far more intense than any conventional internship could have been. The connection to his family roots added an extra layer of motivation to every task, every meeting, every prototype developed during his time in Gyumri.
The city itself is a story of its own. Gyumri is known for its historic architecture, its vibrant cultural scene, and an energy that blends tradition and modernity in a very unique way. For someone working in design who needs to develop an eye for visual detail, living in that environment was almost like having a constant hands-on lesson outside the office. The colors, patterns, and contrasts of the city seeped into his visual perception and, in a way, fed into the interface work being done during the day.
It helps to understand what this kind of work actually involves. In digital design, UI refers to the interactivity, appearance, and feel of a website or product, while UX is about the overall experience a user has with it. Sunni’s internship took place at a company that was developing an educational website focused on teaching programming — in other words, a project with a clear purpose of teaching code to others.
His main role was pretty specific. Sunni’s job was to create the interfaces and UI for the mobile version of the site, with a special focus on iPhone and iPad. The company wanted to make sure the content was easy to read across all formats, which requires tremendous care with screen adaptation, readability, and element organization.
To reach the final result, Sunni used the digital illustration app Procreate to sketch out early versions of the interface. Then those drafts were uploaded to the cloud and refined in Figma, a cloud-based collaborative design tool where the final design took shape. That workflow — from hand-drawn sketch to polished interface — shows how the creative process in design combines artistic sensibility with modern technical tools.
The role VCU played in making it all possible
International internship experiences look amazing on paper, but the financial reality is usually the biggest barrier for anyone trying to turn that kind of opportunity into something concrete. In Sunni’s case, the support his family could have offered didn’t come through, and that’s where VCU’s Internship Funding Program stepped in as the key piece of this story. The program helps cover costs that students face when pursuing unpaid internships, and it was exactly that support that allowed Sunni to head to Armenia.
In Sunni’s own words, the feeling is one of gratitude. He shared that he was really happy to have had the opportunity and thanked VCU for the generous funding that made it possible to get to Armenia. That’s no exaggeration — without that support, the trip likely wouldn’t have happened.
The impact of the funding showed up even in the practical details of daily life. Although Sunni had relatives willing to host him, the Wi-Fi connection at their place wasn’t great, which would have been a serious problem for someone who needs to work with online design tools. With VCU’s support, he was able to rent a nice apartment close to work with a connection good enough to work from home when needed. It might seem like a small detail, but stable internet is literally essential for anyone working in UI/UX.
This kind of university initiative has a real impact on shaping design and technology professionals. When an institution invests in letting its students experience different markets, different cultures, and different challenges, it’s essentially broadening the horizons of the people who will go out and work in the world. In fields like UI/UX, that expanded perspective is especially valuable because interface design work inherently needs to account for varied human contexts.
A journey to VCU full of twists and turns
Just like the trip to Armenia, Sunni’s path to VCU had a few unexpected curves of its own. He always loved drawing and knew in high school that he wanted to incorporate it into a career somehow. The first step, though, went in a different direction: Sunni started out studying game design and production at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
It was during a graphic design internship that the turning point happened. Sunni realized he enjoyed that kind of work far more than the technical side of game production. That discovery is what motivated the transfer to VCUarts the previous spring and the official change of major. In other words, his connection to VCU is recent, but it was born from a deliberate decision that lined up with what he truly wanted to do.
And even though it’s a new connection, it’s already proving to be a strong one — in large part thanks to the financial support that made the summer in Armenia possible. An institution that backs its students early on like that tends to build a relationship of trust that pays off for a long time.
What a UI/UX internship teaches you in practice
Working in UI/UX in a real professional environment is different from any academic project, no matter how well-structured it is. In an internship, the decisions have real consequences, the deadlines are real, the feedback is real, and so are the limitations. Sunni went through this process in an even more challenging context — working in a different country, with teams that had distinct cultural dynamics, and needing to adapt his own way of working and communicating to function well in that environment. That kind of adaptation is exactly what builds more well-rounded and resilient professionals.
Sunni himself sums up the takeaways nicely. According to him, the internship taught him what a regular nine-to-five work routine looks like, strengthened his professional communication skills, and helped him build interpersonal relationships. These are gains that go far beyond a portfolio and make all the difference when you enter the job market for real.
From a technical standpoint, the focus on mobile interfaces during the internship brought direct exposure to the specifics of that format. Designing for mobile demands special attention to visual hierarchy, the size of tappable elements, navigation flow, and perceived performance — because the user is on the go, with divided attention and often on an unstable connection. Thinking through each of those factors while creating an interface is an exercise that develops a much sharper sense of what actually works in practice, something you can hardly learn just by reading about design theory.
Beyond technical skills, an internship like this develops something that doesn’t show up in any portfolio but makes a huge difference in a career: the ability to work under uncertainty. Being in a new place, with new processes, alongside people with very different life experiences, and still delivering quality work demands a professional maturity that only comes from real-world practice. Sunni came out of that summer in Armenia not just with projects to show, but with a much clearer sense of the kind of design professional he wants to become — and that, at the end of the day, is the biggest takeaway any internship can offer. 🎯
A program built with support from many hands
It’s worth mentioning that VCU’s Internship Funding Program doesn’t rely on a single source. It’s funded by a combination of the university’s own resources — from the areas of strategic enrollment management and student success and the School of Business — as well as donor contributions through the Student Life and Learning Fund and grant funding from the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia. This arrangement shows how different institutions and supporters come together so that stories like Sunni’s can actually happen, paving the way for more students to have transformative experiences both within and beyond the United States.
