Ashley Zahorian

I attribute my success to the grace of God and good parents, and an ability to pursue interests and be pushed to excel young. I was able to explore what interested me early on and had parents who encouraged me to push myself to do my best from a young age.

Don't hold yourself back. No one is holding you back. There's somewhat of a perception, because of the way numbers were skewed, toward male dominance in the industry, but furthermore, what is going on is today, in my experience, women don't say yes to going out after work, and then they don't form the friendships that result in the opportunities because they just go to work and leave. But the staying out after wrap is also important, and the speaking up and asking questions - sometimes people are afraid to not know the answer, to ask the question and look stupid. Ask the question, because that's how you learn, and be bold, and state your ideas. Don't wait to be 100% confident, because no one is.

There's an impression of a challenge with AI, but I personally don't feel it. Good storytelling is still good storytelling, and AI tools are phenomenal to help with that, and they don't replace human beings. Within higher education, there are two things. One is AI being used to replace work, but I pretty much combat that with not having assignments that AI could do - I don't have regurgitate the textbook assignments. I see it as important in general life to learn more how to use the tools that exist rather than try to pretend they don't. The fact that we had a bad wig and were able to fix that in post in a way that would have cost us our entire budget before - this isn't a bad thing, this is a good thing that enables more creativity. The other challenge is workforce readiness within higher education, making sure that students are not squandering student loans to get degrees that they can't possibly use to advance their careers. We've structured a curriculum that really helps people find out in the freshman year if this is what they want to do, so that they can succeed in it, or change majors before it's too late.

The existence of absolute truth is most important to me. You can get very manipulative with our values when we say it doesn't matter, and there's a difference between I don't have it figured out, and there isn't a truth. Within that, there are absolute truths to things like honesty and integrity and good work ethic. Something that's very important to me is the honesty of when you can't finish something, owning up to it and saying I can't finish, because it happens. What's not okay is to let the ball drop without communicating. The ball does drop, and people do get overwhelmed, or get sick, or just can't do things, but you have to communicate it. I value the most of every minute. I don't understand wasting time. We don't have enough for it to be wasted. There's a difference between rest and squandering time.