Operational Risk Management for AI and Data Governance at First National Bank (FNB).
Part of Advice from the Board, a HAIL series where we ask advisory board members the three questions students care about most: what skills to build, how to stand out, and what to go try. Here’s what Julia had to say.
Julia’s main piece of skill advice applies to every major, from philosophy to art history: learn prompt engineering. She doesn’t see it as mystical or hard, just basic.
“I feel like that is an absolutely essential food group, like learning good punctuation.”
To stand out, she says, show initiative. Go get real experience through internships or even unpaid work, then be able to own it and explain it clearly. She also raised a pattern she wanted students, women in particular, to hear: “We absolutely as a gender tend to think that we have to perfect things before we’re ready. And that’s just simply not the way others think that are also competing.” In other words, you don’t need to feel flawless before you put yourself forward. And when you do land an interview, research the people you’re meeting far more thoroughly than a quick LinkedIn scan.
For tools and experiences, she suggests looking for roles that use optimization and workflow tools, and using AI the way it’s meant to be used: “I’m a big fan of using models and ChatGPT, but not the way the students tend to use them to basically do the work for them, but rather to go really deep with really good prompts on the research.”
Her own career is a good example of how foundations compound: process re-engineering, then M&A integration, then change management, then operational risk, and now AI governance. Broad starting points can lead somewhere quite specialized.
Want more? Explore the rest of the Advice from the Board series.