By CLAIRE WINTER
By this point, every student on the Beloit College campus is familiar with every one of their professors’ views on AI. Some strictly forbid it, while others encourage it only for prompting and idea generation. And yet others encourage AI tools such as Grammarly, but eschew more generative AI like ChatGPT. However, our professors themselves must be informed on this technology to effectively teach their classes and when it comes to the real world, there are even more places where students need to be informed. Jessica Fox-Wilson and Ted Wilder held a joint seminar on October 30, in order to teach professors about how their students might be seeing and interacting with AI in both the job search and in their careers.
“Employers are already using this stuff,” says Fox-Wilson, who is the Director of Career Works at Beloit College. “Students are going to encounter it.” According to Fox-Wilson, about 84% of employers already use AI to weed out potential candidates- which could apply to anything from applicant tracking to evaluating candidates’ tones, facial expressions, and word choice in video interviews. While these tools improve efficiency for the employer, they may also reinforce inherent biases involved in hiring practices and limit accessibility for candidates.
As someone involved with launching Beloit students into their careers post-grad, Fox-Wilson encourages students to use tools like Google Interview, which asks interviewees questions, analyzes their answers, and provides feedback. Another alternative is the ever-present ChatGPT, which she recommends for finding specific career paths for students. Fox-Wilson emphasizes the need for students to edit and check their outputs. Instead of copy-pasting AI-generated material, students should use things like ChatGPT output for ideas that they can then use in their own pursuits.
While AI might be forbidden in some classrooms, the same doesn’t apply to the workplace. Wilder, who is the Chief Information Officer and Library Director for Beloit College, tackled another important question- once graduates are situated in their careers, how will AI use look? Wilder describes an ongoing trend for candidates with AI literacy to be more desirable as employees than candidates without, calling it a “huge employer demand”, comparable to the massive recruitment for skills in technology and Internet literacy during the dot-com boom. Employers might favor an otherwise less qualified candidate simply because they have experience using AI. Prompt engineering itself can be classified as a distinct skill set for employees- the ability to have a ‘conversation with the AI’ and modify prompts to receive a specific output from the engine. Wilder emphasizes that AI isn’t ‘bad software’- it just needs to be taught properly to the people using it, similarly to how ‘internetting’ had to be taught to people unfamiliar with it in workplaces. Some of that might involve ethics while using engines like ChatGPT, but it might also mean working on specific ways to incorporate AI to do tasks humans shouldn’t have to.
We’ve all heard discourse and viewpoints about the ‘ethical uses of AI’- discussions that are, undeniably, critically important to how we engage and use AI in our education. There’s no denying the problems that it fosters- violation of intellectual property, the dangers of misinformation, and the general uncertainty about something not at all contributed to by an actual person. But in the professional world, AI is already finding footholds, and it’s just as important for professors and mentors within the college environment to prepare their students about that, too. “Something about what we’re looking at [with AI] will continue,” says Wilder. “These tools are not done.” We can’t just stick our heads in the sand and ignore the growing prevalence of AI in workplaces, no matter how hard we might fight to keep it out of academia. Whether or not most generative AI will look like this in ten years, whether or not we think it’ll save humanity or doom it, students need to have these conversations and be informed- most especially by the people teaching them.
Featured Image by Sophia Nitsche’25
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