I'm a self-taught mid-career level product designer (5 years of UI and some UX) and immigrant in Canada with a foreign non-related degree. After 1 year of looking for a job (I'm working part-time for a company affected by Covid) I've decided to fix my credentials.
Which option should I choose?
My location: Toronto, Canada.US
Remote options: UC Irvine, Bentley, DePaul … (open to ideas)
In person: Waterloo MDEI (6k) or UoFT M.I. UXD (10k).
Note since Canadian options are cheaper for me, I could add a Norman Group Master certificate.
Constrain: my partner works in Toronto and might need to be in person in the city once in a while.
Ideal but with a lot of constraining: pick a top school like Carnegie Mellon (80k) and find and see if my partner could work remotely living in Pittsburg for example.
Career goals:
Goal1: being a product designer and never work for a shitty company anymore that lacks funding for dev work or undermine UX which is required me to prove results in my portfolio.
Goal2: make a ton shit of money. I would like to work with AR and spatial interfaces but it's ok if it's a boring b2b software that pays me well. The max I did was 70K CAD.
Goal3: I don't want to be a UX researcher but this is my weakness and my company is against UX research, I had to pay from my pocket. I'm tired of this game. I also need to code because my current company hires devs who can barely make backend work.
Backstory: I'm stuck in my career and I can't change my job unless it's to switch to another shitty job again (got offers from companies with horrible reviews on glassdoor) After one year and seeing people with Waterloo degrees from THE SAME company I work and fewer skills moving to different companies easily. I've reviewed my portfolio with 4 people at FAANGs and they told me I was stellar.
