What ChatGPT and other tools WON’T be able to help you with on your essay
With all the pressure applicants face in the struggle to get into the right college, it’s easy to see why some people might feel tempted to use artificial intelligence tools to do the work.
Some say, “Why not use it? It’s there, and I bet lots of other people are using it. Why shouldn’t I?”
I’m going to step away from the obvious arguments about integrity and cheating. I won’t even mention that ChatGPT and its artificial brethren often have lousy, hackneyed writing that does nothing except paint an applicant as lazy and indifferent.
Shape your future
You shouldn’t use AI to write your college essays because you really need to be clear on why you want to go to college, and which university is really the right fit for you. If you go through the application process without seriously considering who you are in this moment and what a college education will prepare you for, you have cheated yourself out of the college application process - the opportunity to shape your own future and pursue (or discover) your life goals.
Generate inspiration
You should be excited to write about what you have learned about yourself, and eager to share what you will participate in on campus. You should have some ideas about the career paths that interest you based on your life experiences and what you hope to achieve.
When you take the time to brainstorm and think through these ideas, you may find that you are generating more inspiration. A future you had only vaguely considered may start to crystallize as you think through what you have to offer a particular school – and what they have to offer you.
The Hidden Costs of Student Debt
Most families can’t just write a check and pay for four years of college up front, which means you’ll be taking out student loans. If you don’t know what you want to study or do as a career because you haven’t really examined the reasons why you want to go to a specific school, finishing a degree could take five years or more.
Going blindly and deliberately into debt with only a vague idea as to what you’ll be pursuing is risky and foolish. Some careers which used to guarantee employment and a living wage are now less reliable in the age of artificial intelligence.
You can’t afford not to ask yourself the questions colleges are asking you: What are you going to do with your life, and why do you want to do it on our campus? Those are not questions a bot can answer for you.
The work ahead
If writing a bunch of essays for college applications sounds like a lot of work and you can’t get through it without having AI do the labor, you really are not going to like your college workload.
And if you are going to get through college by using AI for your writing assignments, why go in the first place? You’re sacrificing your ability to think and reason so you can prioritize activities other than your classes and your work. That may work for a while, but it is not worth owing thousands of dollars in student loans for a degree you didn’t really earn.
Employment
You will reveal yourself, not only as a person who has not leveraged AI as a tool, but also as a person who cannot string together a coherent thought without using it. Jobs are hard to get and harder to hold onto. What kind of employee (or employer) will you be if you lack the ability to think critically because you’ve outsourced all your critical thinking to a machine?
There’s hope
If applying to college seems overwhelming but you really do want to consider and think through the big questions, let’s do it together.
CLCK HERE to find out how I can help you.
