ARTSCI 121 is an asynchronous, online course that explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping work and early career pathways. Designed as a non-technical entry point, students hear from employers, develop a professional mindset, strengthen storytelling and networking skills, and practice using AI thoughtfully. Rather than treating AI as just a set of tools to master, the course helps students situate it within their own learning and future work. Offered quarterly, 1-credit, open to all students. 

A hands-on professional learning lab where you uncover the stories beneath your experiences, practice telling them for different audiences, and get feedback from real employers and managers. Offered quarterly, 1-credit, open to all students in the College of Arts and Sciences. 

Three courses that take you from telling your story, to practicing professional work, to doing real work for a real organization. You can take each course on its own, or take all three as a sequence.

ARTSCI 201: Crafting Professional Stories 

Your classes, jobs, and life experiences already hold evidence of what you bring. Learn to find those experiences and shape them into stories for introductions, résumés, applications, and interviews. Then use feedback to make them land with different audiences. 1 credit, offered Autumn quarter.

ARTSCI 202: Applied Professional Practice

Practice what it’s like to do work someone else depends on. Through simulated workplace challenges, you’ll learn to figure out what others actually need, work through ambiguity, make decisions, collaborate, and respond to feedback before the stakes are real. 1 credit, offered Winter quarter.

ARTSCI 203: Project-Based Internship 

Take on a real project tied to a genuine organizational need, developed and supported by gesture. You’ll scope the challenge, build and revise your contribution with guidance and feedback, and present the value you created. 1–3 credits, repeatable.

ARTSCI 221 is a 5-credit, project-based course for students who want to think more deeply about how AI is changing learning, work, and their own growth. Instead of treating AI as just a tool to use or a shortcut to avoid, the course asks a bigger question: what kind of learner are you becoming as you work with it? That question becomes real quickly in early career. Interns and new hires are often expected to learn independently, navigate unfamiliar problems, and use tools like AI without outsourcing their own thinking. ARTSCI 221 gives students a way to practice that before they are in those situations. 

ARTSCI 370: Peer Leadership and Facilitation (1–5 credits, repeatable)
For returning gesture students taking on leadership roles. Facilitate workshops, mentor other students, and support courses and projects, while building your skills as a leader through observation, feedback, and reflection.

Already have an internship? Earn credit while learning from it. Through guided reflection and feedback, you’ll make sense of your challenges and contributions, tell the story of what you learned, and carry it into what’s next.  This course is 1–6 credits, repeatable.

gesture workshops are short, focused experiences that help students build the capacities that matter in early career, including AI fluency, storytelling, networking, communication, and a stronger understanding of how to create value for others. Whether students are learning to build and solve problems with AI or developing stories for interviews, the goal is the same: to practice judgment, sense-making, and communication in moments where lists of skills are not enough.

This new short-form video series hosts conversations with faculty across all four divisions of Arts & Sciences. Rather than explaining what students learn in a particular major or discipline, the series explores how learning within a discipline changes them: how it shapes the way they think, how they see and engage with the world, and how they understand and tell the story of who they are becoming. 

UNHIREABLE is gesture's podcast about work, college, AI, and the things students are usually not told directly. Through conversations with the gesture team, students, and employers, it explores the gap between doing well in school and becoming someone who can actually navigate early career life with judgment, direction, and a story that means something.