Nicole Mclean is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at InStage, a company based in Canada that uses conversational artificial Intelligence simulations (i.e. avatars), which among other things, allows college students to practice their interview talks for internship or cooperative education positions before doing them. Nicole’s career began at Scotia Bank where she saw the problems of preparing junior people for presentations and applied simulations there as the head of the Calgary Training Center. However, she was interviewed here as the simulations are very useful to safely and conveniently help students gain interview skills so they can land an experiential education activity such as an internship that could be key to their career launch. In this interview, Adrienne and Nicole discuss more of Nicole’s origin story and personal affiliation for practicing public speaking, and why such simulation practice is important. They consider the fact that some 74% of InStage users report an increase in confidence on their first interview, particularly when the students come from under-served backgrounds and seek to enter technical fields but lack the soft-skills needed to land the job.