Ah, late August. A time of collective return to the classrooms and the desperate suction of any last bit of summer air one can get. I fully cannot believe how quickly the summer went by. It felt like just last week I was in New York, celebrating the Knicks’ Finals win in the Manhattan streets with thousands of other ecstatic fans. But now I return, with a mix of excitement and melancholy, to my final year of high school.
Along with every other rising senior in the country, I’ve spent a lot of time this summer thinking about my college applications. Holy cow, there’s so much to do. There’s standardized testing, there’s writing, there’s activity-drafting, there’s more writing. Oh yes, and did I mention? More writing.
What’s made it a little easier is I really do love to write. What’s made it harder is that I’ve pushed everything out so far that these next few months are really going to make me question if I love writing. Nonetheless, I remain in (relatively) high spirits as the school year kicks off again, and am looking forward to discovering more about myself, and my grit, in this application season.
One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about, especially as I draft my essays, is the value of authenticity. There are so many moments where I feel I have to make a decision whether or not to represent what is truly and authentically myself. Will an admissions officer judge me if I share a bodily function like perspiration? Will they think that my essay about death is too edgy? What should I put down as my last activity slot, something that might be more impressive, or something I really liked doing?
Authenticity, ironically, is one of the things I’m thinking most deeply about for Deskpad as well (see, I finally made it back to the point of this blog). In this flurry of summer homework that was pushed off far too long and supplemental essay drafting, many students are turning to good ol’ AI to do some of the heavy lifting. One thing that’s given me some ease of mind is many teachers at my school are taking a much more definitive and defensible position on AI in the classroom this year. Many are allowing the use of it for activities deemed appropriate, such as brainstorming, and are putting in place much more tangible responses for students who teeter or cross this line. Furthermore, I’ve seen an influx of students begin to resent using AI altogether, even for class activity. While I still believe in some of the potential AI holds for education, it is definitely a step in the right direction to see students proactively steering themselves away from misuse.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that a lot of students, especially in this hyperbolic pressure chamber that is the college admissions process, are turning to AI to help them draft their essays. Last week, I too got a little curious, and decided to test ChatGPT to see how it would do on an essay prompt I created. I created a generic prompt (“Write about a time you felt upset with someone close to you.”) and asked the model to write an essay that “sounded like a smart college applicant.”
What I received back from it was lukewarm at best. The language and prose were fine, and some of it even sounded a bit human. However, what it lacked, for lack of a better word, was soul. The AI-generated essay felt immensely soulless to read. Even the parts it tried to make personal—a made-up anecdote about my Indian background—read like a generic copy and paste from what could be any Indian-American student’s life.
And this is when a realization about all this hit me. The personal statement, in essence, serves as an opportunity for a student to tell a story only they are capable of telling. The difference between the AI-generated essay before me and some of the beautifully-done ones that my college counselor has shown me is that the beautifully-done ones are told uniquely from the perspective of the students. Only they, of the millions of prospective applicants, had the ability to have written that particular essay. They bring in specific, tangible, vivid human experiences that an AI model cannot sufficiently replicate, and use a voice that can only be attained by rounds and rounds of editing. And for sake of experimentation, I did try to alter the prompt with the AI. I asked the model to include more vivid imagery, more specific experiences, and anything I could think of to bridge the gap in quality that I was realizing had been in front of me the entire time. But time and time again, it would stick to the same repetitive patterns, and the same generic, boring examples.
What this really taught me is that authenticity might be one of the few advantages we don’t have to earn. Every human on this planet has a unique background, unique experiences, and a unique story to share with the world. AI is created on the training, compilation essentially, of human data and writing. It tries to create a human-like experience by fusing together countless data points of other human experiences. But the funny thing is that college admissions essays do not ask for a compilation of humanity. They asks for one person: you. If there’s one takeaway to all this, it’s that the most authentic self is always the best version of yourself, especially when it comes to writing college essays. I hope to keep this in mind as I apply to college, and I wish all other seniors the best of luck through these next few months.
