Episode 62 | A Conversation with Dean Sevin Yeltekin on AI, Adaptability, and Leadership

In Episode 62 of “Market News with Rodney Lake,” Professor Lake, director of the GW Investment Institute, welcomes Sevin Yeltekin, the new dean of the GW School of Business, for a discussion on her leadership experience, the role of AI in education, and her vision for the school. Dean Yeltekin highlights her passion for building programs, fostering innovation, and preparing students for a future shaped by AI and rapid market disruptions. She emphasizes the importance of pairing technical proficiency with domain knowledge, communication, and teamwork. Dean Yeltekin advises students to embrace adaptability, lifelong learning, and the confidence to tackle complex problems, while expressing optimism about their talent and potential to grow into future leaders at GW.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:47 Dean Yeltekin's Background
• 3:34 Vision for the GW School of Business
• 5:27 AI in Education and the Job Market
• 18:43 Advice for Students
• 20:04 What are you most optimistic about at GW School of Business?
• 20:38 Conclusion

Transcript

Thank you for joining Market News with Rodney Lake. This is a regular program for the GW Investment Institute where we talk about timely market topics. I'm Rodney Lake, the director of the GW Investment Institute. Let's get started.
Welcome back to Market News with Rodney Lake. I'm your host, Rodney Lake. Today we have a very special guest. Extraordinary guest. So excited. Dean Sevin Yeltekin. Thank you for being here. Dean Yeltekin we’re thrilled that you're on the show.
We're thrilled that you're here at the GW School of Business. Welcome. I know it's not your first day anymore, but it's still pretty early in your term.
But I'm thrilled that you're here. We're so excited that you're here on campus with us. We're so excited for your leadership as the dean of the George Washington University School of Business.
Welcome. Could you maybe introduce yourself? And I'm going to say a couple of things before you do that, but maybe give us a little bit more background. But we know you came from the University of Rochester Simon School of Business. Very well-regarded school. And then at Carnegie Mellon, you also had leadership positions there. So maybe a little bit of an intro and then, you know, why did you come to GW?
Yes. Well, thank you for having me. This is really delightful and I'm very excited to be here. I... My background is really I am an academic economist and, started out as a scholar and a teacher. Got assigned some administrative work, as one does, and then realized that actually, the problems are quite interesting. They are complex, and I seem to have a knack for being able to do some of these administrative work.
So I got assigned even more administrative work. That's what that's what happens. And, and I got to a stage where I was a senior associate dean at Carnegie Mellon, in charge of the educational programs. I was able to really push through a lot of initiatives and start a lot of different formats, whether that was interdisciplinary work, interdisciplinary degrees, incorporating different experiential opportunities for the students.
And I realized that I have that entrepreneurial nature, but within academia, where my where my, you know, background is and I want to I like building things and I like building programs. I like making sure that the students and the faculty and the research environments thrives. Went over to Simon to become their dean and learned a lot.
I started in the middle of Covid, which was a challenging time. So there were no shortage of crises to to manage at the same time to, to innovate and had a really nice, you know, five year term there where we were able to not only survive Covid really well, but also push out new degree programs, push out new innovative AI initiative.
So I'm delighted to be able to carry all of that experience over here. And my background in terms of my research is very much at the intersection of economics and policy. So what better place that to be at a university in the heart of DC, that has also very, very close ties to both industry and policymaking. So I'm excited to be able to make some, you know, headway with our partners and bring some new ideas and implement them at GW.
Well, super exciting. Thank you, Dean Yeltekin for sharing that additional background for us. I think it's important for us to have some context to see where people come from. But as you know, we're all super focused on what's happening today and what's happening tomorrow. As investors. That's what we're always focused on. Is the future right? We know what's happened in the past.
But, you know, context is important. So thank you for sharing that. So maybe thinking about the future, in the George Washington University School of Business, could you talk about, you know, your vision for the school? And I know it's early days. To be fair to you. And I know you're, you know, just getting started relative to, you know, sometimes, you know, what it takes to shape an institution, but maybe a little bit about what your vision is for the school of Business.
I think for any school of business, but especially when we think about sort of being a business school in the heart of DC and having a university, community that is very well plugged into both policymaking, law, and as well as technology, it's really about thinking through what is the value of a business education? What do our students need to know and need to be skilled at by the time they leave our classrooms and launch their careers?
How can we continue to be really impactful for their career and professional and academic journey? That's what keeps me up. Yeah. And I used to teach a class in emerging markets, and I used to ask the students a lot of times, and I would try to show them that the different outcomes that happens in various countries across the world, some did really well, but they didn't do so well.
So a broad range of disasters. And and I would say, well, what what do you think really drives these differences? And what do you really think is the biggest disrupter when they seem to be on a good path and all of a sudden taking a step back and a lot of times students would talk about, oh, well, they didn't implement this.
They didn't implement that. And I said, well, what keeps them from implementing those good practices? And we almost came back to the same idea, which was that policy is a huge disruptor. And we're seeing that now in real time. And that's going to be constantly an evolving landscape. And businesses have to thrive in an environment where these kinds of disruptions come through.
And one of the biggest disruptions right now, in addition to policy is, of course, the emergence of and the incorporation of AI. Oh, wow. And yes, as an academic institution, we have to think very seriously about what that means for our students future, what that means for our teaching pedagogies, what that means for the skills and what that means, how we get them ready for careers.
That's what's been really on top of mind for me. And I would love to have a comprehensive plan that we can implement quickly so that AI and familiarity with AI, using it as a productive tool rather than a shortcut, and being able to equip our students to become proficient at using it, but at the same time having the domain knowledge right to be able to use it effectively.
That's really where I want to spend some time. Excellent. Well, to follow up, maybe on a couple points there. So one is you're talking about return on investment. You know, from these degrees both from the undergrad side and from the graduate side, you know, on the undergrad side for the students and certainly their parents who sometimes talk to, you know, they're very curious about how we're incorporating AI, as you mentioned.
And on the grad side, you know, if people are retooling as an example, they really want to know how that that retooling is going to benefit them. And ultimately, what's the return on investment for their time, effort, energy and capital that they spent here at GW? So I think that's super important. And maybe just to connect one piece while we're, you know, talking about AI for the GW Investment Institute, we've been talking about this on the show, and many of our viewers would know that, our largest position in all of our funds is is Nvidia, which is really at the center.
And they just did a big announcement with OpenAI $100 billion investment. And so, you know, maybe dial that back down to some of the things that you're talking about. You know, maybe if you could give an example or just some highlights of what you think, what could we do? Obviously we're trying to connect what's happening in the market back down to our students and saying, okay, this is very important.
Maybe some ideas about what you think we could do. So there are a few areas that we can really, I think, put our and concentrate our efforts. First of all, it's a very complex problem. It's great that we're, we're we're investing in Nvidia. At the same time, though, I want the students to be aware of all of the ecosystem around.
Right. We have a lot of discussions around energy use. Where is that energy going to come from? We're now hearing sort of investments in nuclear energy. When we spent many, many decades dismantling right where plants were now rebuilding. It's a renaissance, right? There's a renaissance, but that's going to take a decade. Nuclear that takes time does not pop up the next day.
But in the meantime, what does that mean for the evolution and the speed of evolution of AI incorporation into our workflows and into the industry? We're hearing a lot about enterprise models rather than open source models. So where is that going to take us? The students should be watching that market very, very well. That's an important point. And do it in a comprehensive fashion in terms of both policy regulation, not just the technology piece, but also the energy, right.
So on the other hand, we don't want the students to be just proficient in one tool. That's the tool du jour. your right. That's not how education that is long lasting works. We want them to be comfortable with the tools that they have right now, but also realize that you need to continue to be agile. You need to continue to learn.
And continuing to learn means that you really need to have some domain knowledge. The world is too complex to be a perfect generalist, right? So find areas where you do actually gain some domain knowledge because that domain knowledge is going to help you also differentiate technologies that are short lived from technologies that are really going to make a long term impact.
Being able to find out what really works well for your environment, you know, we went through a phase where everything was about big data. Companies invested huge amounts of money in collecting big data, working with consultancy firms to solve their problems with big data, only to realize that they could have done all of that with short and small data.
So we really need our students to be equipped with the domain knowledge plus all of the behavioral skills, communication, team management, working in a team, being able to give convincing arguments so that they can bring a board or the directorship on board with their ideas. All of those combined with never stopping to learn. That's where I think the magic is going to happen.
Yeah, and I think that's an important point that you made here, is that it's kind of getting back to old school, nearly learning how to learn. And so when you come to school, obviously the AI tools are evolving so quickly, as you mentioned, that you could learn the tool today that's obsolete. Maybe literally tomorrow for AI. So it's really important to understand how to use them and how really how to learn and use them as tools, amongst other tools that that you're using.
So I think that's a critical and important point that everybody has to learn, including including us here at GW. So thanks for sharing that. So a couple other things that just want to follow up on the on the AI game. You know, one of the things that's happening in the market is you're seeing how, you know, jobs, some at least at some places, you know, people worry about this.
Well, maybe there's not going to be a job for me when I leave. What are your thoughts about, you know, how that market is evolving so quickly and what what we can do is maybe even faculty, staff, students. How do we prepare for that when the market's changing so rapidly? I'm glad you asked that, because we have a policy and business forum that's coming up that's exactly on this topic, which is the future of work is now.
And we have to grapple with those questions and get our heads together to be able to solve that issue. Right. Which is, what should we be getting our students ready for now, I still believe that a fundamental education and understanding how businesses and markets function, it's incredibly important, but at the same time, being comfortable with the tools, not as a shortcut, but being able to sort of work with the tools so that you can display that competency and show that you can actually, you know, it's not just solving the problem for you, but it's enhancing your learning or being able to get deeper into a problem and come up with a maybe a unique solution.
And at the same time, you still have to be convincing. So what I want the students to do is continue to be very much engaged. One of the things that I think would be very detrimental is to retreat into our own sort of you know, cave and, and work with just the tools, without that human interaction, without that networking, without those engagement.
Networking is still extremely important. Human relationships are extremely important, and managing people is still extremely important. The tools are exactly that. Tools. They're going to make you more productive. They're going to give you some maybe, you know, ability to sort of bypass some headaches. They're going to make you more efficient, but they're not going to replace you if you have all of these other skills as well.
So I encourage the students to get involved, not to just zoom into things from their kitchen table or their bedroom to form relationships and to really exercise that muscle of learning. Keep learning. Right. Look, and I think that's an also important point for our students and for ourselves, really, our students, faculty and staff, everybody, and not just at GW, is that it's important to have these human connections because, you know, these are all tools.
And maybe at some point we all get replaced. But, you know, that's probably not tomorrow, but maybe it happens, with, you know, robots. But having these connections, you know, makes these people more powerful, not not less powerful. And so the types of jobs will evolve, just like when the looms were started long ago and people thought, you know, there will be no more jobs ever.
That ended up not being accurate. And I think this is tends to happen when these transformative technologies, you know, take places that people assume that really that the worst is coming always. And I think you're giving us good reasons. Let's be optimistic. Let's prepare ourselves. Let's let's look for the bright future, which I think is an important point.
Thanks for saying that. And thanks for mentioning the Business Policy Forum. And I think it's important for all of us to be thinking about what's the future of work and what that looks like. And that's going to be happening right here on campus. So thanks for sharing that. A couple other things. So for AI, you know, do you have any personal preferences, that, that you like to use, but you do use any of these models? And what's been your experience and what are your thoughts on, you know, how quickly things are changing?
Well, I do it is changing very fast, at least for the kind of usage that I am looking towards. And I do use ChatGPT, nice, I do have that $20 subscription that I pay for so I can get the unlimited number of sort of, shots at it.
For me, what it has done is really, a couple for some of it is just speed up my administrative work. I write a lot of memos, I write a lot of different things. I read a lot of different things to prep for meetings, and I'm crunched for time something. So it's great to be able to put those into ChatGPT and say nothing.
Nothing. Very, you know, I want no sensitive information, but I be able to put that and say, give me some of the breakdown or I need to go and talk to, you know, so just get some, get some highlights, get some executive summaries in a timely fashion. A lot of times it helps me organize my calendar, of course, because I want to be able to sort of put together a calendar that makes the best use of my time and best use of the time of the people that I am meeting.
So I use it in my administrative function a lot. And let's face it, sometimes I write emails and I'm not quite sure about the tone. Yeah, I do actually use the ChatGPT as a bit of a sounding board. Does that sound professional enough, or does that sound just really angry? And in which case, tone it down? I'm going to hold on sending.
Yes, I'm going to hold on sending that. So there are many ways that we can use it. I've used it to do itineraries for my personal travel and business travel. I've done it to, you know, for example, I do a lot of, again, the slides because I give a lot of presentations and a lot of times, you know, the time I spent is really making sure that the lines are readable and I've got the legend right, and that takes a lot of time.
It's a little bit of a grunt work, packing a little bit to do that very, very easily takes the grunt work. I still have to think about the content, what's the direction, what's my message, what are the pieces of information I'm choosing to put on the slide? But I don't want to spend 20 times perfectly right. You know, 20 minutes perfectly formatting it.
ChatGPT can do that job for me, but what I have not used it is just to sort of go in there and say, give me the answer, right. You know, make a strategic plan for the business. Go. I have not done that, because if you don't actually understand the culture, the context, the people, the assets, it's going to give you a very generic answer.
You're going to sound like everybody else, and there's going to be nothing special or specific about a school of business in there. And so it's been a really wonderful way to just take out the grunt work, test some ideas, prod it a little bit and, and, and and really play with it. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that personal anecdote.
That's I'm sure people are interested to hear that. So thanks. Given you're an expert in background, in AI, but I will just give you one anecdote. So I spent most of my PhD years, working as an RA for my advisor. And my job was he was writing a book about computational economics and at a lot of algorithms and, and in we would supply the code to go with the book itself.
So my job, because my, advisor would write or some of his old RAs would write the code in Fortran. My job was to translate the Fortran code, one of my jobs into Matlab and Mathematica. I would be so out of a job right now.
Yeah, because that was it. I when I think about the number of hours I spent decoding and writing code, ChatGPT can do it in a second?
In a second, I would be completely out of it. You know, as you mentioned, you would have a different role for exactly that particular job would go away. But what I did learn is algorithmic thinking, analytical thinking, being able to adapt from one script language to another type of script language, being proficient with computers and not being afraid of them.
And of course, having the domain knowledge of economics to make sure that the answers it was spitting out were correct. And I could write, test, use cases and test them to make sure that what I had written was actually getting to the right answer. You can't do any of that if you don't have that basic education. And that's the message that I want to give to the student.
Well, I think that's a great message. And I think, that's an important message that students really need, again, to really learn how to learn, learn how to think and organize these tools to make themselves, as you mentioned, more productive, not replacing, not saying, just give me the answer. Because many times, as you mentioned to, we don't necessarily know the answer to these problems.
And so but that's part of sometimes the fun and the challenge of solving them is that we don't know the answer and nobody knows the answer, but we're going to find it. But having the tools accelerates that process makes us more productive. Thanks for sharing those anecdotes. One more thing that we want to end on here and we can maybe add too, but let's start with one, which is what advice do you have for our students?
You've given some already. It's certainly, but is there something that new that you would like to say or something that you might want to highlight for our students and maybe around AI or something more general? But what advice do you give to our students, both undergrad and grad? I think in addition to the things that I have said, which are, you know, keep being engaged, make sure you get that domain knowledge, don't take shortcuts, but also understand how the technology is evolving and get comfortable with it.
I really, honestly want the students to not get paralyzed by worrying about what's going to happen five years from now, because we don't know and they don't know. The important thing is to keep an open mind, keep trying new things, keep exercising that muscle of learning, keep finding and and forming very strong relationships with their own peers, with their faculty, with the alumni really getting out there and building up their confidence, building up their confidence to be able to tackle complex problems.
That's where we don't know what those complex problems are going to look like. You don't know it. I don't know it, they don't know it. But if you build up the confidence to tackle complex problems, that's going to serve you extremely well throughout your career. Thank you. Great advice. Last, last question. Okay. What are you most optimistic about at GW School of Business?
I think that we have an enormously great group of talented grad and undergrad students that come in from very different experiences, come in with a lot of energy, a lot of ideas. And what I'm really excited about is that harnessing that energy into developing them into leaders, turning leaders are turning learners into leaders. Excellent.
Well, that's a great place to finish the show. Dean Yeltekin, I want to say thank you. Thank you very much for being on the show. This is a wonderful opportunity to chat with you. I hope you'll be back someday on the show. So again, thanks for this episode and we hope to welcome you back soon. I would love to be back and I won’t send my AI avatar.
Nice. Thank you. And that's it for this episode of Market News with Rodney Lake. Thank you.