Career Slay

What do you do when the career you trained for is no longer the path you want? Dr. Sheila Gujrathi spent years training to become a physician, the one path her family saw as safe, respected, and secure. She completed every step of that training, including medical school at Northwestern, a residency at Harvard, and a fellowship at UCSF and Stanford, before admitting to herself that clinical medicine wasn’t her calling. That honesty led her into biotech, where she built a career across Genentec...

What do you do when life throws a curveball that knocks you off course? After several months of silence, Career Slay host, Kelly Poquiz Burke, returns to the mic with the story behind the break. Kelly shares how the podcast pause began as a planned refresh in March, and how she caught herself repeating the hustle and burnout habits she thought she had left behind in corporate. What she didn’t anticipate was a unexpected health crisis that resulted in three surgeries in three months forcing he...

What if one of the biggest drains on women’s time, energy, and leadership potential is something we rarely name? In this episode, Kelly sits down with Dr. Allison Alford, clinical associate professor at Baylor University, communication scholar, executive coach, and author of Good Daughtering, to explore the invisible labor of “daughtering.” Allison shares her unconventional academic journey, from earning her PhD as a mom of two to building what she calls a “portfolio career” that blends teach...

Pivoting can feel like failure. It can feel like quitting, like starting over, like admitting you got it wrong. In this solo episode, Kelly unpacks what it really means to pivot and why it’s often the most aligned and courageous move you can make in your career. From changing majors at University of Notre Dame, to earning her MBA, to shifting from advertising into brand marketing at Frito-Lay, to founding Career Slay, Kelly shares the defining pivots that shaped her professional path. If you’...

What if the thing holding you back in your career isn’t a fact, but a story you’ve been telling yourself? In this episode, Kelly sits down with leadership coach, speaker, and former Google leader Barbara Boselli to explore how the narratives we create about ourselves can quietly shape, and sometimes limit, our careers. From growing up in Brazil and navigating cultural transitions in the U.S., to building a successful corporate career, leaving Google to focus on family, and eventually launchin...