Tech-Neill-ogy #94 - 26 May 2025

Welcome to Tech-Neill-ogy #94!

It was a crazy couple of weeks over here, to the point where I finished the newsletter last week, but then because I was traveling, I realized I never sent it! So here’s an updated version of what was meant to be sent last week.

I was in London for the BMI-THE Global Counselor Workshop and Forum. This is the third year of its existence, and I’ve found it to be an amazing opportunity to interact with and learn from peers around the globe. I also had the pleasure of visiting Royal Holloway University, St. Mary’s University, and Le Cordon Bleu London, not to mention having met 1v1 with dozens of university reps. In all, a good week. And now we are into the real home stretch as we enjoy Senior Week with our pending graduates who will cross the stage this Saturday.

In other news, there are now over 1600 subscribers to this newsletter. Two years ago (at the first BMI-THE Global Forum), when I first started this, I never imagined it would grow to these numbers! Thanks for the support!

Enjoy the newsletter!

This is an interesting one I used recently for a meeting that mysteriously did not appear on my calendar and yet required some advanced preparation, for which I did not have the time when I learned of it. I had found this in the interesting newsletter of Jeff Su, whose work is worth exploring for tech tips and tricks far beyond college counseling and artificial intelligence:

Act as an expert summarizer and critical reader. I'm going to share an excerpt with you and your job is to extract the key insights, break down complex points into simple language, and structure the summary so it's easy to scan and understand.
Start with a brief overview (2-3 sentences), followed by key takeaways as bullet points or sections (depending on the content). Highlight any data, trends, or powerful quotes worth remembering. If the excerpt is biased, outdated, or missing context, let me know. At the end, suggest 1-2 thoughtful follow-up questions I could explore or ask someone if I were discussing this in a meeting. Assume I want to sound sharp without reading the whole thing.
[Paste article or document]

To illustrate, here’s a presentation I received today from friend Niamh Kavanagh at Maynooth University about the university. To test this prompt out, I uploaded it into ChatGPT, and ran the prompt, and here is the output. Pretty interesting and useful in a number of contexts.

In any case, if you have any great prompts or ideas, please share! Send me a note at [email protected].

For the non-tech piece this week, this Ron Lieber NYTimes article on college pricing was one that I found pretty interesting:

This quotation particularly stuck out:

“You have to know how to manage these data and aggregate them, because if they’re presented as individual variables, they just look like vomit,” Mr. Zucker said. “Any individual click doesn’t mean diddly.”

Enjoy your week! Happy counseling!

Jeff