The AI Moment for College Students

Dear college students (and those who care about them),

I’m temporarily putting my professor hat back on to give you some advice on the “AI moment.”

I see many of you flailing a bit and struggling to establish a foothold while trying to adapt and compete with AI. You have two options:

• Do things AI can’t do: Skilled blue collar or tactile jobs will persist with fulfilling and lucrative opportunities for some time

  • Robot masseuse and robot plumber ain’t cutting it… at least not yet

• Be valuable working with AI in increasingly competitive white collar jobs

For those of you deciding on option 2, here’s one thing you need to understand. AI magnifies the impact of the top in their fields and makes them more valuable. If I want AI to mimic, magnify, and scale someone, I want it to be the best. I don’t want to scale the mediocre. However, AI can also rapidly accelerate the learning at the bottom end, primarily made up of new entrants… like you, my dear college student. If you’re choosing option 2, one of the best paths forward is to start moving to the top as quickly as possible, establish a niche expertise, and then expand from there. So… how?

1. Select a valuable topic to master – Probably the hardest step. I once spent three days deeply understanding the intuition of support vector machines. It did prove a little useful, but I probably should have invested my time and effort elsewhere. You’ll constantly make these mistakes as well. Start rapidly learning SOMETHING now, but be willing to pivot and adjust.

2. Find a foundation – Pick up a foundational text or source of knowledge within that domain. Remember, it might not be your class’s textbook.

   1. Read It: The idea here is to use the text as an introduction to mastery. It should be providing you frameworks for HOW to think about the field, not just definitions or jargon.

   2. Absorb It: Read it again. Discuss it. Teach it to someone. Copy and paste it one chapter or section of a chapter at a time into a tool like Notebook LM and listen to each “podcast episode” at least three times.

      1. This is more valuable than whatever else you’re listening to. Stop waterskiing knowledge and start rapid scuba diving. You’d be shocked how many colleagues became experts simply by knowing the fundamentals insanely well and then also being able to appropriately apply them.

3. Master it! – Once you have a basic understanding, fire up an advanced AI to quiz you on the specific topic, but NOT on the specific materials (assuming it’s a topic AI knows). Just have it straight up ask you about questions on that topic, whether it’s in the book or not.

   1. Have it ask you OPEN-ENDED questions. Speak or type 1-2 PARAGRAPH replies. Tell it to be blunt and identify every explicit error, poor assumption, and gaps in knowledge. If you can’t handle blunt constructive feedback from an AI, I don’t know how you’re going to do it with real humans. Zero pride with AI.

   2. Anything you miss, dig in on that specific point with the AI. Go back and forth again. If you don’t understand the response, keep digging until you have mastery all of the way down to the foundation.

4. Apply – Over the course of a few weeks, a good friend of mine built and hosted a personal server to run AI and other applications out of his house with very limited knowledge of servers or networks. He learned everything on the job with AI. It required hard work, but in just a few weeks he pulled it off and learned a tremendous amount. You are going take what you are learning and apply it. Choose a novel and interesting application. Don’t just stumble your way through without questioning how each component operates. Master each step. Every stumbling block is an opportunity to develop deeper expertise on that point.

5. Socialize – Finally, get out of the isolated digital world and start showing up at meetups, conferences, or any event to get a feel for what people are doing. How do they talk? What are the frameworks and tools they use? Don’t get pulled deep down into the rabbit holes you’re not ready for (they will be everywhere at these events), but start seeing what expertise looks like and know how to pivot and expand.

It sounds daunting, but I and many others do this all of the time to master new topics with this new technology and we are not super geniuses. My field is quickly shifting under my feet, and there is no way I can keep up, but I can still establish valuable footholds of expertise just like you. AI is creating shifts in many fields, which can be ideal for you because pockets are developing where very few have real expertise. However, static fields are often less competitive, and an upstart can leap forward quickly. You can do this!

Bottom line: I don’t know how students 5-10 years from now will compete, but today if you’re willing to use AI and swallow your pride, learn new things, and show some ambition, you’ll do fine.