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...
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The Glance Test: Why Your Slides Must Make Sense in 3 Seconds
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
The Glance Test is a simple but powerful rule for slide design: if your audience can’t understand the point of a slide within a few seconds, the slide isn’t doing its job. In this episode, I explain why slides that demand too much reading or decoding cause audiences to stop listening—and how the Glance Test helps protect attention during live presentations. You’ll learn how strong, message-driven titles anchor understanding, why visual simplicity matters more than precision, and how to design slides that support your voice rather than compete with it. The episode also explores the...
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One Idea Per Slide: The Rule That Will Change Your Presentations
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Many presentations fall apart not because the ideas are weak, but because the slides are doing too much at once. When a single slide contains multiple messages, charts, or competing points, the audience stops listening and starts decoding. In this episode, I explain why the “one idea per slide” principle is so effective—and why it’s one of the fastest ways to improve clarity in presentations. You’ll learn what “one idea” actually means, how strong sentence-based titles do most of the work, and how to use visuals that reinforce your message rather than compete with it. The episode...
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ENCORE: MBA Alums Offer Advice on Effective Interviewing
Conversations on Careers and Professional Life
Foster Alumni Share What They Listen For When They Interview Job Candidates Every fall and winter, MBA students gear up for behavioral interviews with an understandable mix of anticipation and anxiety. We spend hours coaching them on frameworks, stories, and delivery. But nothing beats hearing directly from the people on the other side of the table. On this encore episode of Conversations on Careers and Professional Life, I brought together four Foster MBA alumni—now at Accenture, Google, Walmart, and Goldman Sachs—to share what they actually listen for when evaluating...
info_outlineAnshula 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 new federal legislation made their product obsolete almost overnight.
In this conversation, Anshula talks about what it takes to build an AI startup under time pressure, what the experience taught her about when to use AI and when not to, and her advice for business students figuring out where they fit in a landscape that keeps shifting.
Key Takeaways
Know when to kill the idea. Find your idea killer early — before you're burning capital defending a thesis that no longer holds.
Customer discovery still beats AI research. The most valuable insights came from talking to people. AI supported the market sizing; the real signal came from humans in the room.
Make AI work with how you already work. Don't reinvent yourself for the tool. Figure out where AI makes you more productive in your existing workflow, and start there.
Keep your own voice. As models improve, your distinct perspective becomes more important, not less.
AI is ambient infrastructure. The question isn't whether it changes your work — it will. The question is how you position yourself within that change.
About Anshula Singh
Anshula Singh is an MBA candidate at the UW Foster School of Business. Prior to Foster, she spent five years as a software engineer at Salesforce and ServiceNow, where she worked on machine learning applications and contributed to early large language model development.
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Conversations on Careers and Professional Life is hosted by Gregory Heller and produced at the UW Foster School of Business.