ALEXISWICHOWSKI
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Fall 2024
Digital Strategy & Leadership
This course kicks off the program’s overarching purpose: to forge tech leaders with staying power. All aspects of the course will be applied to each students’ career objectives, infusing foundational knowledge with applied skills and strategies to navigate and lead in the digital age. The course starts with an overview of technology principles and practices, focusing on both technical and human influence in its development and use. With practical training on ways that technology, psychology, and other tactics can be applied to create cultures, practices, and systems for impactful lasting change, the course explores digital transformation from the individual, team culture, societal and global levels. Course assignments consist of applied skills trainings designed to equip students with the habits of mind, skill sets, and strategies to navigate complex systems, foster empowered teams, and drive long-term and tangible change at scale.
Fall 2024
Special Topics: Technology & Power
This course explores technology’s role as a tool of power for and impact on individuals, communities, and societies. These topics are examined across three discrete units: 1. Infrastructure: how geography and physical resources serve as resources and/or obstacles to the control of critical internet architecture; 2. Society & Culture: how historical social and cultural norms influence adoption, usage, and perceptions on technology in modern life; and 3. Geopolitics & Economics: how diplomacy, defense, and governance influence technology innovation, development and diffusion. The goal of the course is to prepare students with the skills needed to assess the potential risks and benefits of technologies across various contexts both at present and for future development. As such, assignments mirror what’s found in professional policy development, including one-pagers, briefing memos, and persuasive presentations.
Spring 2025
Presence & Persuasion for Tech Leaders
This course teaches students how to get through to any audience for any reason. Technology leaders, more than in any other industry, must be equally comfortable as public speakers for vastly different audiences, from software developers and sales teams to politicians and the general public. Through exercises in speaker and audience analysis, studies in public speaking techniques, and an exploration of behavioral psychology principles influencing audience receptivity, students will gain tangible skills to increase their impact as public speakers. Specifically, this course will equip students to: 1. identify how impactful speakers prepare for, present to, and pivot for maximum impact according to audience type, size, and receptivity; 2. learn strategies on how to “read the room” and adapt both verbal and nonverbal communication techniques in real time; and 3. gain hands-on experience in public speaking through exercises designed to develop public speaking skills across a range of tech-sector specific experiences, circumstances, audiences.
Spring 2025
This course equips the next generation of technologists with the skills, strategies, and savvy needed to secure systemic and lasting change for social good. These topics are examined in three units: 1. Intrapreneurship: how to guide responsible technology within and by multinationals and other large-scale, risk-averse institutions; 2. Entrepreneurship & Nonprofits: how to balance market pressures with values-based missions within startups, nonprofits, and other social-good tech enterprises; and 3. Civic Tech: how to navigate policy, politics, and bureaucracies in delivering citizen-facing technologies within local, regional, and national government bodies.