Hi, I'm Audrey Gao

I am a multidisciplinary researcher passionate about accessibility and social science in tech.I'm also currently seeking a Summer 2025 internship with a company that values nurturing budding creatives in the fields of user research, writing, and design.

Design work I've done

A collection of designs that best showcase my eye for art and design principles. This page is currently graphic design-centric but UX case studies are coming soon!

Graphics

Personal work

Illustrations, sketches, and paintings, oh my!

Personal work

Sociological research about topics close to my heart

"Hockey, Homosexuality, and Canadian National Identity" (2023)

Outlining the research process for a personal topic, complete with conceptualization, operationalization, and consideration of quantitative and qualitative means of analysis.

"Fictional Foul: Masculinity and Sexuality in Sports Fanfiction" (2023)

Using NLP and machine learning to analyze the depiction of sexuality in relation to race and gender in the context of sports fanwork.

UX/Technical Writing

Coming from a sociology background, I love (and know how) to write.I recently discovered the field of UX writing/content design. Seeing as this is a field where I can leverage my empathy and research skills from sociology and cognitive science, I immediately fell in love. Below, I've included a little glimpse into my first ever technical writer internship.

Technical writer internship

Coveo (September-December 2024)

Side quest: check out my personal writing portfolio!

The below folder is constantly evolving—just like me as a writer. However, in general, the writing inside tends to be more personal either in its form (narrative essays) or subject matter.

Welcome to my site :)

I'm Audrey, a sociology and cognitive science student at McGill University. I'm currently exploring the world of UX reseach/design, so I've created this site as a collection of all my relevant projects. My work is informed by my background in social science research, my passion for storytelling, and my lifelong love of art.I've previously worked on technical writing for Coveo, communications for ABB and design for McHacks. Outside of work, you can find me journaling in coffeeshops, drawing in parks, and logging new movies to my Letterboxd.If you're interested working together (or want to bounce ideas) shoot me a message! Messages about how your sports team of choice has once again disappointed you for another year are equally welcome.

What I've been up to lately

McHacks 11: what comes after a decade?

McHacks is McGill University's largest student hackathon, hosting 500+ student every January. In the 2023-2024 semester I worked alongside my dedicated peers on Hackboard - our organizing committee - to put together the eleventh iteration of McHacks taking place January 27-28, 2024.Although I've worn many hats at McHacks, especially during our ultimate in-person event, this year I primarily worked as the design team lead. I conceptualized the branding for McHacks 11 keeping in mind that since this was our first reappearance after our tenth anniversary, we wanted to mark the beginning of a new era.McHacks 10 was full of blues, greens, yellows, and flat colours. So this year, we decided to put warm colours and texture at the forefront. This branding applied to all our external promotional material (i.e., social media and merch) and internal documents (i.e., sponsorship packages), as seen below.

I also had the chance to explore wireframing and prototyping, working collaboratively with both the design and development team on Figma.

The final result of our teams efforts is live on mchacks.ca - that is, until McHacks comes back for its twelveth interation.

A fall semester at Coveo

In Fall 2024, I experieced my first ever tech internship as a technical writer at Coveo, a Canadian SaaS company working on AI/ML search solutions. In my role, I contributed to 20+ articles of documentation, with the subjects ranging from indexing to search query pipelines. I worked across VS Code, GitHub, and too many open research tabs.The biggest project I worked on is still in the pipeline. However, I'm happy to discuss the details during a call/interview. In the meantime, feel free to watch this recording of my end-of-internship presentation where I summarize my experience learnings!