Tech-Neill-ogy #34 - 4 February 2024

Your Weekly Guide to Leveraging Technology in College Counseling

Welcome to Tech-Neill-ogy #34!

I’m excited to report that the following for this newsletter has surpassed 400 subscribers. 414, to be specific. Thank you all for your support!

I’ve seen a bunch of memes about how long January is, and, honestly, I couldn’t agree more. It is February 2024, but it feels like it should be much later! That said, I’ve shared much of the busy-ness of this past week here.

I’ve become quite fond of the Fliz app, and I have again turned last week’s newsletter into a video. See it below!

Thanks, as always, to those of you who share resources with me. I appreciate it! In any case, feel free to drop me an email at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you!

This week’s prompt is in line with a series of experiments that I have been doing in regard to supporting different components of our work as college counselors. For example, I have long had a practice of offering those teachers who write letters of recommendation for students to sit down to review the corpus of their work so as to find suggestions for improvement. I wondered what ChatGPT might do to aid in this process by examining individual letters.

<upload letter of recommendation>

The attachment is a high school college counselor letter of recommendation for a student. This student intends to apply to hyper-selective and hyper-competitive engineering universities in the United States. Please suggest five concrete recommendations for how to make this letter more compelling for admissions.

Give it a try with one of your own letters, but feel free to try it out with teachers’ letters. Of course, I recommend turning on the privacy protections and also altering student names.

As always, if you’d like to explore some of the other hacks, tips, and prompts I’ve shared here and elsewhere, check out this link. If you have any great prompts or questions about prompting, send me a note at [email protected].

I spent some time this past week in speaking with the good folks at Harvi, the app referenced above in Extracurriculars. I am excited to see where this one goes, but know that this one is entirely free. Take a look. I’d love to hear your feedback.

On another topic, I wanted to share this gem shared by Pam Joos. This is the Honors Program prompt that admitted students to Michigan just received:

Utilize an AI text generator to write an essay on the topic “How does the LSA Honors Program satisfy your desire for a particular kind of living learning community in your first two years of college?”

Provide us with that essay and then write your own essay discussing whether or not that AI-generated essay accurately captures your desire to participate in the lower-division Honors Program in your first two years of college. Reflect on your personal goals and meaningfully discuss how/why the AI-generated essay captures or doesn't capture that. Please limit your essay to 1000 words. The word count does not include the AI-generated essay. Some generative AI tools are located here: https://genai.umich.edu/resources/tools

How’s that for an awesome assignment?

And happy counseling,

Jeff