Teach For America

I taught fourth grade down there.

I did teach for America.

So I taught fourth grade.

Yeah.

yeah,

yeah.

What made you want to go to law school? I mean, I feel like going from teaching like Teach for America to law school, those feel like two different tracks of life to go on.

What made you make the switch to law school?

One of my favorite David Brooks articles that I actually assigned to a bunch of my freshmen at Notre Dame is about this effective altruism movement.

So the, if, I don't know if you remember this, but there was this, uh, class at Princeton about ethics called Practical Ethics, where one of the big themes that the professor, Peter Singer, he's a hardcore utilitarian, would hit with his students is, look, you're a very idealistic, high-talent young person, and you might think that the way that you're gonna build a good life and serve the world is maybe going to join the Peace Corps, going to do Teach for America, doing, like, direct service to the poor.

But in fact, if you do the math, if you have the potential to enter a really high-earning profession, become like a high-frequency hedge fund trader, right now it'd probably be go work for an AI company, and you could earn a lot of money, under global capitalism, you could redistribute that money to pay for 1,000 teachers or to cure the disease that you're going to directly serve the poor that are suffering from, and wouldn't that, that just objectively is gonna have such a greater scale of impact than how you might devote your time if you did direct service.

Do not do direct service.

Welcome back to Elevate Your AIQ, your go-to source for insightful conversations on human-centric AI readiness, talent transformation, responsible innovation, and the future of work.

Today, I'm very excited to share my conversation with Tracy St. Deke, VP of Global Talent at Zapier, who spent 15 years in education as a classroom teacher and then leading national recruitment at Teach for America before bringing that same belief in access and untapped potential to Zapier's talent organization.

Spacey and I dig into how she and her team built and have since evolved Zapier's AI fluency rubric, what actually separates real AI transformation from surface-level adoption, and why hands-on experimentation beats any classroom when it comes to building AI capability.

We also talk about how her team is reshaping the recruiter role itself, freeing people to spend more time on the coaching and relationship building that only humans can do.

But

before that,

I was at Teach for America.

I spent probably about 15 years in my career starting as a teacher and moving all the way to leading our national recruitment team at Teach for America before I joined Zapier.

City Year in New York, you know, I've had many...

Teach for America.

Teach for America.

Honestly, it's fantastic because one of the issues in today's world is very stratified society and it's got more stratified through social media.

So very often we need a social blender.

You know, so

I think that.

Well, that's back to Teach for America.