What is the gesture?
gesture reimagines what college and career preparation can be. Change isn’t optional, it’s already here. As the landscape of work, learning, and technology continues to shift, gesture offers a new approach to preparing for the future of both college and early career.
For more than a decade, we have worked closely with employers to understand how Arts and Sciences graduates actually perform in early career roles. The hard truth they consistently share is that very few students are prepared for the realities of work. While the reasons are complex, one pattern is clear: the mindset that helps students succeed in school often does not translate to success in the real world. In many cases, it actively gets in the way. We want students to do well in school. But if school is the only skill you have, student is the only job you are qualified to do.
How does gesture work today?
Rather than a single linear pathway, gesture operates through a set of connected courses, workshops, and experiential programs. Each offering is designed to help students practice our pillars: mission, challenge, and story in an AI-shaped world. To see current courses, workshops, and upcoming opportunities, visit the link below and explore what’s available right now.
ARTSCI 150: AI, Learning, and Early Career
ARTSCI 150 is a 1-credit, asynchronous course designed as a non-technical entry point into gesture’s approach to AI, learning, and early career. Instead of treating AI as a set of tools to master, the course helps students situate AI within their own learning and professional trajectories. Students explore how the career landscape is changing, build practical AI fluency grounded in real contexts, and practice articulating their experiences through narrative. Particularly by developing an initial “AI story” that shows how they used AI to learn or solve a problem.
ARTSCI 250: Learn with AI
How to Know, Learn, and Think Differently in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
ARTSCI 250 is a 5-credit, project-based course that uses AI as a lens for examining how learning itself works. Students are positioned not as recipients of predefined knowledge, but as investigators of their own learning processes. Within gesture, ARTSCI 250 extends and deepens the work of ARTSCI 150. The focus shifts from AI literacy toward metacognition, judgment, and adaptive learning in an AI-rich world. Students pursue self-chosen topics with AI as a collaborator, using reflection, iteration, and non-linear inquiry to surface how habits of learning, knowing, and meaning-making develop over time.
Vibe Coding Sprints
The Vibe Coding Sprint is a short, intensive workshop experience that uses AI as a collaborative thinking partner to help participants turn ambiguous, real-world problems into meaningful, shareable artifacts. The workshop translates abstract ideas about judgment, ambiguity, and sense-making into a lived, time-bounded experience. Participants build alongside AI while confronting its limitations, learning where technical capability ends and human judgment becomes essential.
Story Workshops
gesture’s story workshops focus on helping students turn everyday experiences into narratives that matter, especially in high-stakes moments like interviews. In these workshops, stories matter more than lists of skills. They make students memorable, reveal how they think, and demonstrate the value they bring to a team. Participants respond to real interview prompts, receive feedback from peers and gesture mentors, and use AI as a creative partner to refine and strengthen their stories.
Why AI, and Why Now?
gesture treats AI as an unavoidable and consequential condition of early-career life, not as a discrete skill, toolset, or ideological position. Within gesture, AI functions as a practice space for learning how to define problems, exercise judgment, and navigate ambiguity in real contexts. Students learn to think with AI: understanding when and why to use it, where it introduces risk, and when not to use it at all. This approach responds to a widening gap between how quickly AI is reshaping work and how slowly institutions can adapt. gesture creates space for students to develop agency, literacy, and adaptability before expectations harden in the workplace.
Looking Ahead
gesture is also building toward a longer-term, multi-year intellectual and professional experience that integrates coursework, internships, and applied learning around mission, challenge, and story. If you’re interested in learning more about that future direction or exploring how gesture might fit into your academic path, reach out to us. We’re happy to start the conversation.
Questions?
gesture@uw.edu
Credits:
gesture