Austin Scholar #155: How AI will transform university education
& advice from a Stanford freshman
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: Advice from a Stanford freshman
How AI will transform university education
Scholar’s Sources: How to become an expert (as written by Austin Scholar)
My midterms are over! And my studying paid off. I’m super happy with how I performed on my Math 51 midterm and have already started studying for the final so I can maintain that success. Here is the ChatGPT prompt I used to study:
I just attached the pdf version of a chapter of my math textbook. I am studying for a super challenging exam and want to make sure I understand every concept in this chapter. Please explain the main concepts like I’m five years old.
Once I get the basic idea down (usually explained in some form of building Legos or playing with a robot), I’ll ask for a step-by-step equation for how to solve each question type mentioned in the chapter.
For every example given in this chapter, please create a step-by-step formula for solving these questions and relate it to the concepts you previously explained.
Finally, I’ll ask Chat to create questions that are similar to those in the textbook and, if I’m unable to solve them, ask Chat to walk me through every step.
And that’s how I improved my midterm grade by over ten points!
Austin’s Anecdote: Advice from a Stanford freshman
A few weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter about how two of my classmates got into Stanford.
I know that I have a lot of readers who want their kids to get into an Ivy-Plus university. So (if y’all end up liking it) I’ve decided to make the Anecdote section pieces of advice every week from students who were admitted to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and more.
This first week, I talked to Annabelle Chang, an 18-year-old founder of Annabelle’s Book Club, a bookstore in LA.
I asked her what, with 20-20 hindsight, is the best advice you wish you could’ve given to your parents as they supported you on your journey of both becoming a business owner and getting into Stanford? What would you want them to do the same? What would you want them to do differently?
“I’m lucky to have incredibly supportive parents who have always encouraged me to pursue my passions — both in and outside of the classroom — so I’m not sure that there are any major things I would want them to do differently, but there are certainly many I would want them to do the same.
When I decided that I wanted to open a young adult-focused bookstore and presented a detailed business plan, they were extremely enthusiastic and have been with me every step of the way: helping me unload books on opening day, attending every one of our author events, and, most recently, traveling to Austin with me to hear me speak at SXSW EDU.
Similarly, when I decided that I wanted to transfer to an online high school so that I could launch my bookstore while still attending rigorous classes, they agreed that it was important to choose the path that worked best for me, even if it looked a bit different than some of my sisters’ and friends’.
Whether it was opening the bookstore or deciding to apply to Stanford, their advice has always been the same: follow your passions, because when you are excited about something, that enthusiasm will come through to other people, too.”
How AI will transform university education
I’m not going to lie: this newsletter is pretty abstract and less concrete than I typically like to do, but I’m always asked what the future of AI in education will look like, and my classmates and I have been talking about this a lot.
I expect this to be the first in a multi-part series. There’s a lot to dig into, and my thoughts are still evolving, so feel free to skip the theories until I post a condensed summary in a few weeks.
But there’s a lot I want to get into today. In the next section, I have included exercises on how to become an expert in a topic using AI, so you can scroll down to that if you’re not interested in high-level AI musings.
A common question I get asked (often by kindergarten moms) is what the future of school will look like when AI “already knows everything”? Do we even need to learn anything? Or can we just use ChatGPT for everything?
To date, most of my newsletter content has been about K-12, with just the occasional focus on university. But Stanford has a course series for freshmen called COLLEGE 101 that really focuses on the question, “Why College?” We talk about why we’re at Stanford, what we want to get out of our education, and how to structure our experience to make sure we achieve our goals. The aim of the series is to help you make the best of your four years.
Unfortunately, this curriculum was clearly created largely before the integration of AI into our everyday lives. Because it feels so outdated, some of my classmates and I have talked about how we would design the COLLEGE curriculum with a much heavier emphasis on AI and its effects on university and graduate studies.
It’s hard to understand the full ramifications, but I think you may find our first draft of thoughts interesting.
Our first insight is that AI and LLMs reduce the half-life of knowledge from ten years to one year. Let me explain what this means: