Two Items
In this Issue
- P’30s/’30s: action needed
- Article with interesting point on AI and college students
It’s the middle of the week, and Mother Nature can’t decide what she wants to do: it’s rainy for a while, then it’s sunny – the only common denominator today is humidity.
Today I have just two things: 1) an important action item for ’30s and P’30s, and 2) some food for thought about AI. Dig in!
P’30s/’30s: action needed
I was in a meeting earlier today with one of my colleagues from Residence Life and Housing, and they asked me to remind all ’30s and P’30s to be sure to have their ‘student ’30 check their status in the Housing Portal.
Right now we have a majority of ’30 students who have incomplete requirements for next week’s June 1 checklist deadlines. Most of these are missing Deacon OneCard photos, registering their phone with Wake Alert, and/or housing agreements. And if your student is under 18, you as parent/guardian will also need to sign the Housing and Dining Agreements via the Housing Portal
Impacted ’30 students are getting daily email reminders for missing information. In past years, some students have ignored those messages, thinking they completed the info correctly, when they have not.
Families of students under 18 should check their spam folder to make sure there is not a message saying they haven’t signed the housing agreement on behalf of their minor.
If students do not complete those June 1 requirements, they will not be able to access their housing assignment or schedule their move-in time until these items are complete.
’30s can check the status of these items in their Housing Portal under My Housing and Incoming Student Application on their Application Status page.
Please note that Deacon OneCard Photos and cell phone numbers sync to our system once daily, so it will take a day or two, depending on timing, for those items to update.
Article with interesting point on AI and college students
Working in the communications office, I have access to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Yesterday there was an article entitled What Colleges Are Missing in the Job Market Panic; apologies, there is a paywall for this article and it doesn’t look like it has a “gift” article option.
It was a long article and it talked a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and concerns students have about which majors are “safe(r)” – and then made this point: “In most cases, the choice of major — computer science versus business versus nursing versus English — matters far less than a harder question that almost no college curriculum is built to answer: not which fields AI will spare, but how to remain indispensable inside fields it is already reshaping.”
The article goes on to talk about how students should learn what they can about AI and figure out what AI can – or cannot – do well in their chosen field. Here’s a snippet (italics are my own emphasis):
“’Many companies expect the younger employees to be the ones that are going to help teach them,’ Behrens said. ‘It’s an opening for young people, if they learn about it now.’
His advice mirrors what the research shows. Understand what AI can and cannot do within your specific work. Task by task, not field by field. Develop the skills that remain stubbornly human: critical thinking, communication, creativity, the ability to read a room….
In one of his classes at Duke, students used AI to build a working app prototype in under an hour — then spent the rest of the semester on the harder questions no model could answer: what’s the strategy, who is the customer, and why does any of it make sense for the business.
He used to pride himself on his PowerPoint skills, but that part of his job, he knows, now belongs to the machine. The part that doesn’t is harder to name: knowing his company, understanding what his executives actually need, and reading which projects are worth fighting for and why.”
This might be worth some conversation over the summer: not just about how students might be experimenting with AI, but how to think about developing people skills, emotional intelligence, etc. that can help them add value in ways that AI cannot.
Interesting to think about anyway.