For many, entering college is a humbling period of time filled with harsh adjustments, emotional phases, and collective chaos. In a way, this was also my case. I say “in a way” because although these experiences applied to me, entering college was also my epiphany. It was how I proved myself to myself. I wasn’t top 50 in GPA at my high school, I wasn’t extremely active in clubs or meetings, nor was I a three sport athlete by any means. However, in college, a lot changed. I found a sophisticated side of myself – a person who wanted to go out and meet people; be a part of something; keep a high GPA in my “grueling” major. However, my experiences freshman year did not include an instant change in behavior that created the man I described above, rather it was an intensively laborious year in my studies.
This means my epiphany also brought along some drawbacks – predominantly perfectionism. I became relentlessly demanding of myself. I wanted to be ahead of every class and get the best grades. I did this by taking advantage of the resources my university had available. This included searching up answers to previous homework problems, using databases to retrieve former exams, scheduling office hours with professors, collaborating with other students, and I could go on, and on. It was consuming. A better word would be restricting. This mindset was keeping me from exploring all the rest that college has to offer.
Luckily, this perfectionism of mine died off quickly and by second semester sophomore year, I eased up. I was still putting in a lot of work to keep my head above water in my engineering classes, but at least I wasn’t drowning myself. This is also when, not coincidentally, I committed to some of those new ambitions. It’s the semester when I finally started going to church every Sunday, when I began to learn how to read and write my parents’ native language, when I actually solidified lifelong friends and joined clubs/meetings that I hadn’t consistently attended before. It was all starting to come together, but at times, it can still be a little too much to handle.
Luckily, again, a sensation called AI took a great leap forward the following semester. It rapidly became exploited when people would use it to create college papers for themselves and other deceitful work. I was very closed-minded towards AI. It simply seemed too fishy for me. But nearly a full year later, a video made me curious about all the things I could do with these platforms. Personally, I still rarely used it for my classes. . but it transformed the way I kept up with my other hobbies. For example, I asked AI: “ What’s the most efficient way to learn a new language?”; “How do intermediate players best step up in piano playing?”; and if I did use AI for my studies, it would be with conceptual questions like: “Can you explain the phenomenon of conduction using simple terms?” AI could provide instructions for the most efficient techniques of learning something in just seconds.
Ultimately, AI was the answer to the questions that aren’t always easy, yet described in an intuitive, concise manner. It was a sort of “perfectionism” (taken with a grain of salt) that I could use which I didn’t have to become myself. It filled the gaps of what I didn’t know and couldn’t find elsewhere. I only wish I had started to use it earlier because it was another revelation of mine in college, one that I was far too ignorant about.