What she's doing: Natalya teaches multilingual graduate students in a research and writing course within the Global Pathways program. Students from diverse disciplines prepare to conduct interviews with industry professionals as part of their research projects. To prepare for these interviews, Natalya has students practice with AI simulations first. Students work in mixed disciplinary groups (combining project management, informatics, and other fields) to create an AI persona relevant to their research.

The process has clear stages. First, teams begin by composing interview questions and getting feedback from Claude on relevance and focus. Second, they conduct text-based interviews with their persona, and then analyze the interview transcripts. Third, they identify themes and patterns on the transcripts. Fourth, they have AI do the same analysis. Fifth, they color-code similarities and differences between student and AI-generated themes to explore how their cultural backgrounds and academic disciplines shape their analyses. Finally, students complete individual reflections on how their graduate program influences their analytical lens, which serves to prepare them for real interviews with company managers.

What's working (and what’s not): This low-stakes practice builds confidence and metacognition. Students learn to handle tricky interview moments (like when the AI persona gets too wordy) and decode unfamiliar industry terminology. The interdisciplinary groups create authentic knowledge gaps where students become the experts, teaching peers and even the instructor about field-specific concepts. One student credited the simulation as essential to successfully interviewing managers for the project. The comparison with AI analysis sparks rich discussions about how culture and training shape interpretation. One limitation is the absence of a strong voice option.  While Claude does have a voice-option, it is still in its early stages of development, which means practicing oral communication skills to prepare for live interviews is not as useful at this time.

What's next: Natalya plans to add speech-enabled AI tools for verbal practice. She sees AI collaboration as a semester-long journey for developing student voice in both writing and interviews. Her goal? Help students stay "in the driver's seat" while learning to value their unique perspectives and sense of voice. Through continuous reflection and AI comparison, she hopes that students will develop more confidence in the ways in which their cultural experiences create insights that AI simply can't replicate.