Lauren Selig on Navigating a Career of Creativity and Impact, Live at PNW Climate Week
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Release Date: 07/10/2024
AI Ready: Archit Gupta on Overcoming the Cold Start and Building a Socratic Tutor With AI
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Archit Gupta went from never having written a line of code to building AI tools that grade hundreds of student cases and a Socratic AI tutor for a graduate class — in one year. Archit is graduated from Foster's MSBA (Master of Science in Business Analytics) in June, and served on the committee that planned Foster's first AI Spark Day. Before Foster, he worked in M&A at KPMG, founded a consumer fintech startup focused on retail investors, and held product roles at a Singapore-based fintech. He entered the program with no software background and built AI-assisted grading and tutoring...
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AI Ready: Tejash Bagri's AI Prototype Landed Him an Interview
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
First-year Foster MBA (Class of '27) explains how he turned a stalled application into an interview by building a go-to-market prototype before reaching out — and what that says about standing out when every candidate has the same AI tools. A practical case study for anyone in a competitive recruiting process. Tejash was part of the core organizing team for Foster's inaugural and leads the school's AI and Data Analytics Society. Before his MBA, he worked as chief of staff for a group of organizations in a startup environment, where he built AI-driven workflows for research,...
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AI Ready: Ahmad Ghabboun Discovers His Interest in AI
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
AI Ready: Ahmad Ghabboun Ahmad Ghabboun built a Demo Day–winning AI product during his MSIS program — after arriving with no plans to work in AI at all. He breaks down how his mindset shifted, how his design background made him a stronger prompter, and how to build AI fluency that actually holds up in interviews. Useful for students and early-career professionals trying to get AI-ready without faking it. Ahmad Ghabboun is a Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS) 2026 Graduate at the UW Foster School of Business. Before Foster, he spent roughly fifteen years in UX and product...
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AI Ready: Hannah Hoffmaster - How a Non-Technical Student Became AI-Ready in One Year
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Hannah Hoffmaster went from a self-described two-out-of-seven in technical skill to building multi-agent AI tools in a single year at Foster. This episode is for anyone — technical or not — trying to understand what genuine AI fluency looks like and how to build it. is a student completing the one-year MSIS program at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. She came to the program with some knowledge of statistics and R, but little coding experience. Through her coursework — including Prof. Leo Bousioux's AI and Generative AI in Business class — she developed the...
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AI Ready: Prof. Léonard Boussioux on Why You Don't Have to Specialize Anymore
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
On this episode, I speak wtih Léonard Boussioux — Assistant Professor, Foster School of Business; Adjunct, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, UW. PhD, MIT (machine learning & operations research). Co-founder of . "Professor Leo," as his students call him, is a leader in AI education, research, experimentation, and adoption. He and I are on the Foster AI Taskforce, and sat down for this conversation in August of 2025. Leo rejects the career advice you've heard your entire life: pick a lane, specialize, go deep. His counter-argument is that AI now lets you...
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AI Ready: Nathan Fitzgerald
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Nathan Fitzgerald didn't come up through tech. He spent years as a lobbyist, moved into marketing, got laid off in 2024, and treated that moment as a forcing function: how do I build a skill set that doesn't become obsolete? That question led him to Foster's MSIS program — and to a clear-eyed view of what AI can and can't do. In this conversation, Nathan talks about what it actually looks like to learn AI tools from scratch when you're mid-career. We discuss the concept of cognitive offloading — the risk that you let AI do the thinking for you and end up unable to defend your own work. He...
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AI Ready with Anshula Singh
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Anshula Singh came into Foster's MBA program with five years of software engineering experience — building products at Salesforce and ServiceNow, working with machine learning, helping train early LLMs from the inside. She wasn't new to AI. She was already watching it closely. In her second winter quarter, she took Software Entrepreneurship — a course where students pitch ideas on day two, form teams, and spend ten weeks building a company. Anshula's team built Authscript, an AI platform to automate prior authorization forms in healthcare. They got far enough to pitch in front of VCs. Then...
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Conversations On Careers: AI Ready - Miniseries Teaser
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Two questions are on every student's mind right now: How will AI affect the job I'm trying to get? And how do I show up actually ready to use it? AI Ready — a miniseries from Conversations on Careers and Professional Life -- will feature students from Foster's MBA and graduate programs talking honestly about how they're learning to work with AI. In the classroom. In recruiting. In the work they're already doing. Foster launched an AI strategy this year built around a straightforward premise: graduates should leave ready to use AI as a real professional tool. That means a...
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Ted Jordan From Outsider To Ally - Cultivating A Network to Advance Your Career
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Ted Jordan spent 24 years at Microsoft as a global program and account manager before becoming a consultant, professional speaker, and guest lecturer at UW Foster School of Business. His talk — From Outsider to Ally — reframes how we think about networking: less about tactics, more about making the other person feel seen. In this conversation, Ted shares the specific approaches he used to build relationships inside one of the world's most complex organizations — and what he teaches MBA students about doing the same. What we cover The subject line that gets a response every time Why...
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The Layoff Journey: From Dismissal to Discovery, with Steve Jaffe
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Layoffs are back in the headlines. Job postings are down. Hiring cycles are longer. What does that mean for MBA students and other professionals navigating today’s market? In this episode, I speak with Steve Jaffe, author of The Layoff Journey: From Dismissal to Discovery. Drawing on his experience of four layoffs across a 25-year marketing career, Steve maps job loss—and prolonged job search—to the seven stages of grief. This conversation is both practical and deeply human. You’ll learn: Why career disruptions are emotional, not just logistical — and how naming the grief process...
info_outlineIn this special live episode recorded as part of #PNWClimateWeek and the Bloomberg Green Festival at the KEXP Gathering Space, Gregory Heller and Jonathan Azoff sit down with Lauren Selig, a film producer, investor, entrepreneur, and board member of the XPRIZE Foundation. , Lauren shares her journey from journalism to film production and investment, highlighting the importance of intuition, mentorship, and environmental consciousness in her diverse career. Tune in to discover how Lauren’s innovative projects are making a significant impact on climate tech and sustainability.