VACorps Alumni Interview: Attia Qureshi ('09)

VACorps | April 2026

Describe some of your greatest and most memorable professional achievements

The ones that stay with me most aren’t the biggest stages. They’re the moments where I watched someone realize they were capable of more than they thought.

But if I’m naming milestones — teaching at MIT and UMich was one. Walking into that room for the first time and understanding the responsibility of that platform was humbling and energizing in equal measure.

Working on behalf of the U.S. State Department in conflict zones is another. Those experiences tested everything I teach in conditions where the margin for error is essentially zero. They also confirmed something I believe deeply: the principles of principled negotiation work everywhere. Not just in boardrooms. In rooms where the stakes are life and death.

And building Attia Qureshi Consulting from the ground up — as an entrepreneur, doing the work of negotiating every stage of a business into existence — gave me a credibility I couldn’t have gotten any other way. I’ve lived what I teach.

May 12th — the publication of Never Settle — will be another one. Seeing twenty years of work become a book that anyone can pick up and use is something I’ve been working toward for a long time.

Can you share an example of how your internship experience aided your career growth?

The Cape Town experience clarified something I had been circling without quite landing on: that the work I wanted to do in my career had to be in service of people. Not just intellectually interesting. Not just financially rewarding. Genuinely, tangibly helpful to the humans in front of me.

That clarity became the compass for every professional decision I’ve made since. When I chose to build a consulting practice rather than take a more traditional path, that instinct was there. When I said yes to the State Department work in conflict zones — knowing it would be hard and sometimes frightening — that instinct was there. When I decided to write Never Settle, it was there.

What’s the single most important piece of advice you’d like to give to future VACorps interns and/or those considering participation in the program?

Any predictions for what we can expect from you in ten year’s time?

Ten years from now I hope Never Settle is one of several books — each one going deeper into a dimension of influence and human connection that I care about.

I hope Attia Qureshi Consulting has helped hundreds of organizations build cultures where negotiation and influence aren’t treated as innate gifts but as learnable, teachable skills.

I hope I’m still in the classroom in some form — because there is something about that direct, human exchange with someone who is learning something for the first time that I never want to give up.

And I hope I’m still surprising myself. The Cape Town experience taught me that the most important growth happens in the places you didn’t fully plan for. I want to keep leaving room for that. 

And I hope to come back to Cape Town for a visit!