The Cognitive Advantage: Minerva MDA Alumni on Thinking Smarter in an AI Era

Minerva University’s Master of Science in Decision Making and Applied Analytics (MDA) prepares professionals to navigate, analyze, and shape an AI-driven world responsibly. In this Q&A, we sit down with Gloria Kexin Wu, a Minerva MDA graduate and now Strategy & Operations / Chief of Staff at Karma3 Labs, and how the program equipped her to lead with clarity, critical thinking, and integrity in a world transformed by AI.

Where are you from, and what were you doing before joining the MDA program?

I was born in Xi’an, China. Before Minerva, I was the VP of Acceleration and focused on international EdTech investments at an early-stage fund. Through that work, I came across Minerva and followed its approach closely.

What made you decide to pursue the MDA at Minerva? What stood out compared to other graduate programs?

At the time, Minerva had an exceptional reputation among people building on the frontier of education innovation—and I’ve always been a “meta-thinker,” interested in how we think and how we learn. What really convinced me was meeting Minerva undergraduates in the real world. I had two interns from Minerva, and they were unusually thoughtful and resourceful with minimal guidance—high maturity, strong analytical habits, and a real ability to structure ambiguous work. They were, to me, proof that Minerva’s learning model produces something distinct. I was already looking for graduate education, and when Minerva launched the MDA, it felt like the program I’d been waiting for.

Minerva’s MDA is designed for a rapidly evolving digital and AI-driven world. How did the program shape your thinking about AI and its role in society?

Minerva didn’t “teach me AI” in a narrow, tool-specific way—but it gave me the underlying literacy: how to reason about data, models, and algorithms, and how to collaborate effectively with engineering teams. That translated directly into my later work in product strategy and adoption, where being able to speak the language of technical teams matters for making good decisions. It also reshaped how I think about education in an AI era. AI is rapidly expanding individual productivity and will continue to automate a growing share of tasks and jobs. That means education has to double down on what remains uniquely human: asking better questions, framing problems well, exercising judgment under uncertainty, and building ethical and social reasoning. In many ways, the MDA trained exactly those capabilities.

Your work centers on building trust in online crypto ecosystems. What mindsets or analytical frameworks from the MDA most influence that work today?

The biggest influence isn’t specific to a field of work —it’s the transferability of the cognitive toolkit. The MDA trains you to approach messy, real-world problems with structure: define the problem, test assumptions, separate signal from noise, and make decisions with imperfect information. That said, crypto and open-source decentralized systems are not only technical systems—they are also social, economic, and political systems. So the MDA’s emphasis on thinking in complex systems—emergent properties beyond causal inferences —has been eye-opening. 

Can you share a moment when something you learned in the MDA directly helped you solve a challenge, make a decision, or drive success at work?

I don’t have a single “movie scene” moment, but the impact is consistent in my decision-making practices. One thing I’d like to mention is that most people think the world can be reduced to linear causal effects, which is in every problem, and I used to think this way too before Minerva MDA. However, MDA taught me to realize that the world is far from linear, and prepared to better make decisions that serve the complex reality. I had an intuition, but from MDA I learnt many structures and frameworks to address them more effectively. 

Minerva’s mission is to empower students for a more sustainable, just future. How does that mission show up in your day-to-day responsibilities at Karma3 Labs?

A lot of today’s online ecosystems are optimized for advertising—maximizing attention, not trust. At Karma3 Labs, we’re working toward a different future: recommendation systems driven by peer-to-peer signals—what you genuinely trust, value, and find meaningful—rather than what keeps you scrolling. We’re starting with crypto communities because decentralized systems already have the data architecture to support this. But the long-term goal is broader: helping build online spaces where trust and relevance—not manipulation—drive what people see.

How have the skills you gained in the MDA prepared you for your current work at Karma3 Labs, especially with the pace at which the digital landscape is shifting?

I work in a field that is full of ambiguity and uncertainty. We have to make big decisions every day regarding product directions and business models based on the latest insights or results. It is of essential importance to be able to identify biases that went into these conversations and come out with better decisions.

If you had to give one reason why someone should consider pursuing the MDA, what would it be and why?   

Most things we do to fulfill our job responsibilities will be done faster and better by AI. What cannot be replaced by AI is humans’ ability to ask the right questions, identify the actual problem, frame the problem, pick apart the underlying biases of work done by AI, and know how to make a decision. It sounds simple, but it requires a lot of cognitive training in a systematic way to build habits of the mind. Minerva MDA is the program that does that. A coherent cognitive toolkit + comfort with data/AI is especially valuable in professional contexts.

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Lead with clarity, creativity, and integrity— explore Minerva’s MDA program and apply today to take the next step in your professional journey.