• gesture space filled with students at work
  • Classroom presentation
  • Students/attendees watching presenter at front of a room
  • Students making a presentation to a group
  • Row of people sitting across from eachother and talking
  • students in the gesture space

Welcome to gesture

What is
gesture?

gesture creates courses, workshops, and experiential programs to help UW College of Arts & Sciences undergraduates transition from a student to a professional identity. For more than a decade, we have worked closely with employers to understand what success actually looks like in early-career roles. Again and again, we see the same truth: doing well in school is not the same as being ready for work. 

In a fast-changing world, students need more than knowledge and skills alone. They need judgment, adaptability, communication, self-awareness (learn how to learn), and the ability to use new tools in thoughtful, ethical, and meaningful ways. At gesture, students experiment with, ask hard questions about, and develop their own point of view about how AI and other technologies fit into and support the way they learn and work.  

Students working with gesture learn to craft and refine compelling stories of who they are beyond classes and grades that they can carry into interviews, internships, and future opportunities. They develop an understanding of organizational mission, learn to identify and solve problems for others, and practice contributing value to the teams and communities they join. And they also learn to embrace challenge, recognizing that growth is rarely easy or comfortable. 

Our Pillars

Mission

School often prepares students to solve their own problems and/or problems they have been given: assignments, exams, and requirements. But within work environments, the people who make a difference are the ones who learn to identify and solve problems for others. At gesture, mission means having a bias towards action and curiosity, developing a focus on who you are trying to help, what matters to them, and how to create value. In an increasingly AI-shaped world, a focus on missions becomes even more important: when a tool can generate an output in seconds, the real question is how to make what we are doing matter to others. 

Challenge

Growth rarely happens in comfort. Comfort can sometimes encourage students to avoid risk, uncertainty, or failure. At gesture, challenge means deliberately stepping into situations that stretch you, being willing to take risks, pivot, and adapt. Students are encouraged to pursue work that involves uncertainty, feedback, revision, and the real possibility of falling short because that is often where growth happens. 

Story

Everyone talks about storytelling, but telling is the least important part of story. At  gesture, story is a meaning-making practice that starts with listening: understanding what is actually happening, what other people need, and why it matters before you try to build anything. From there, students learn to turn experience into insight, make meaningful connections, and tell thoughtful stories in interviews, team settings, and other moments, contexts, and genres where they need to make their value visible. As AI makes it easier to sound polished, story is what helps the person behind the work feel memorable and connect with an audience. 

To see current courses, workshops, and upcoming opportunities, visit the link below.

Explore gesture