ChatGPT: A Must for Every Counselor

Technology married humanities, and a baby was born. Sam Altman named this larger-than-life force ChatGPT. Truly, our students seem ahead of us when it comes to understanding it, and even milking it to pull a fast one on us. No doubt, most of us "grown-ups" still seem to be catching our breath around how AI works, let alone raise educational and ethical alarms.

Are you ready to incorporate ChatGPT as a game-changing tool in your counseling office? If yes, read on, and discover five clear-cut ways in which you, as a counselor, can trump your students in the use of this groundbreaking force of nature.

Essay Topic Ideation

Bombarded by another narrative idea on football, cricket, bharatnatyam, or even "helping the underprivileged"? Where do we go to generate fresh and exciting new ideas for the next great Indian story? Look at this AI as an idea-generation-factory, one in which you input a whole bunch of information about your student, and ask what they could write about. Lo and behold, you'll soon see a long list of fresh topics. Side benefit: all this will happen within 20 seconds of you inputting your prompt.

Version One Generator

ChatGPT enables the student to simply input details around an idea, and within seconds generates a fully-polished article as an output of the word length you desire. What's more, the piece has immaculate grammar, smooth flow, and pristine vocabulary. All in all, kids will use this tool to write their essays and submit them to us. High Alert: This is where we need to remind them that application portals have AI & plagiarism checks built into them. As their mentors, we need to tell them that chatGPT can be a great tool to generate a version one of their story, a piece they must modify and insert their own values, tones, personality, technical details, anecdotes, and stories into the essay.

Research

Students, parents, and counselors, alike can now use chatGPT to research everything from colleges to majors, to anecdotes and technicalities of the essays they are writing on. The AI's cool research engine is more powerful than any search engine in putting together results meaningfully when asked simple research queries. The speed with which it yields well-collected facts and analyses is mind-boggling.

Recommendation Letter

Tired of endless recommendation letter writing? Struggling to personalize each letter for the students? chatGPT will now seem God-sent (your personal cheat sheet!). Command it to write a recommendation for the mentioned student, furnish as many details as possible, and get it to write the first sophisticated draft of your personal recommendation letter. You must now upgrade this version one and insert your personal touch, instances from across high school, and your charismatic personality into the letter.

Give Essay Feedback

Your essay feedback is invaluable. It can make the difference between admit and deny. You identify rookie mistakes, fix grammar, uneven flow, and enhance vocabulary, and even feedback on how to say something more meaningfully. But guess what so can chatGPT. Enter a student's writing into the command prompt, followed by: how can this be improved, give me feedback on this, what will an admission officer at xyz college think of this essay, how can this essay be improved upon, what do you think of the person who wrote this, and be surprised at how accurately the program gives detailed feedback.

Hello? Hope you haven't fallen off your chair.

PS: Here is an awesome study about which careers will be most impacted by the rise of AI. Go for a deep dive into it and explore before you direct students in their careers: tinyurl.com/AiyyoGPT