Make Your Insights Obvious With Effective Data Visualization
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Release Date: 01/13/2026
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...
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Slide Decks vs. Slide Docs: Why So Many Presentations Miss the Mark
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
In this episode I break down the difference between slide decks and slide docs—and talk about designing intentionally for each. Many presentation problems don’t stem from weak ideas or poor analysis. They come from using the wrong artifact for the job. Slides overloaded with text are often treated as presentations when they’re really documents meant to be read. The result? Confused audiences, long meetings, and diluted messages. I explain why slide decks and slide docs serve fundamentally different purposes—and why trying to make one file do both almost always fails. In this...
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Make Your Insights Obvious With Effective Data Visualization
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Data doesn’t persuade. Insight does. In this episode, I break down what effective data visualization really means—and why most charts fail to do their job. This isn’t about making slides look prettier. It’s about helping your audience think clearly, decide faster, and trust your analysis. Drawing on lessons from Edward Tufte’s work and Good Charts by Scott Berinato, Gregory explains how to move from cluttered, confusing visuals to charts that make the point unmistakable. You’ll learn: Why every chart should answer one clear question—and how to define it before you design How...
info_outlineData doesn’t persuade. Insight does.
In this episode, I break down what effective data visualization really means—and why most charts fail to do their job. This isn’t about making slides look prettier. It’s about helping your audience think clearly, decide faster, and trust your analysis.
Drawing on lessons from Edward Tufte’s work and Good Charts by Scott Berinato, Gregory explains how to move from cluttered, confusing visuals to charts that make the point unmistakable.
You’ll learn:
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Why every chart should answer one clear question—and how to define it before you design
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How to match chart types to intent, so your audience doesn’t have to work to understand your message
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What it really means to simplify ruthlessly, including what to remove, mute, or highlight
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Why message-driven titles dramatically improve comprehension
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How context, annotation, and design for the room turn data into evidence
Whether you’re preparing for class presentations, internship updates, or executive decks, this episode will help you stop using charts as decoration—and start using them as tools for influence.