Your AI Roadmap

Why Go to College? Navigating AI in Education: A Student's Perspective

• Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek • Season 2 • Episode 28

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In this last episode before a hiatus, Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek and cousin Lucas Bajorek (he/him) explore the evolving landscape of education and the role of AI in shaping future careers. They discuss the importance of networking in college, the impact of AI on high school education, and the necessity of adaptability in the workforce. The conversation emphasizes the balance between technical skills and soft skills, highlighting the value of human connections and experiences in achieving success. Joan shares insights on AI tools that can aid students in their academic journey, while Lucas reflects on his upcoming college experience and the skills he aims to develop.

Lucas Bajorek is a college student with a growing curiosity about how AI is shaping the world. He doesn’t come with expert knowledge, but with an open mind and a willingness to learn. He’s here to share a young person’s perspective, ask thoughtful questions, and explore what the future might look like.

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Who is Joan?

Ranked the #4⁠⁠ in Voice AI Influencer, ⁠⁠Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek⁠⁠ is the CEO of ⁠⁠Clarity AI⁠⁠, Founder of ⁠⁠Women in Voice⁠⁠, & Host of ⁠⁠Your AI Roadmap⁠⁠. With a decade in software & AI, she has worked at Nuance, VERSA Agency, & OneReach.ai in data & analysis, product, & digital transformation. She's an investor & technical advisor to startup & enterprise. A CES & VentureBeat speaker & Harvard Business Review published author, she has a PhD & is based in Seattle.

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Recording, I think it started. Oh, here we go. Power upgrade. Hello! um Can you introduce yourself, please? Hi everybody, I'm Lucas. I am actually Joan's cousin and I just graduated high school. I do not really live close to Joan so I live in Michigan but I'm headed out west to Arizona State and Joan was kind enough to have me on to kind of share my opinion on AI and how it's affected my experience and obviously I'm a little younger than Joan so we have different perspectives but hopefully I can give you guys some of what I've experienced up to this point. I'm excited for it. Thank you, Lucas. And yes, it's an interesting time to be someone who works in AI, working on AI, and then getting, as I mentioned to you, Lucas, last time as we're doing a little prep of like people in my DMs being like, should I even go to college? Like parents being like, I don't know if my kid's gonna learn a job life. And so to be going to college in 2025, congrats on high school graduation, Obvi. you. Thank you. And then getting into ASU, which University of Arizona peeps. I'm University of Arizona grad. There's some rivalry, friendly, loving rivalry. Everyone's got their different strengths. ASU is a beautiful campus. I'll give it that. I'll give it that. For those of you who don't know about that Arizona rivalry, no big. But today we're here to talk about being a student, planning the future, thinking about careers, thinking about AI. And frankly, neither of us had the answers. Let's just be real about that. Right? But you are living it. You are totes living it. So I got some questions for you. Here's my first one. Just like super, super easy fun. Why go to college in 2025? Yeah, sure. So I think uh it's a variety of reasons. College definitely isn't the same as it was 30, 40 years ago and probably not even the same as it was 10 years ago. And as AI has been kind of blown into the modern world and the, you know, everything, everyday world that we're all taking part of, I think it's changed everything. But still being that being said, there's plenty of reasons to still go to college. The network, the people you're going to meet is probably the biggest reason. mean, even with AI, you still need to be well connected. We're still living in a world that's human dominated. You still gotta interact with people. So I think that most importantly, the people that you're gonna meet, the connections you're gonna build, the people that are your age, you're gonna go through the different steps of life, climb the ladder of the, maybe it's the corporate ladder, it's some other ladder, you'll climb them with these people and having those connections is invaluable. Absolutely. Well, an ASU is not a small school. Jumping into a ballpark size, we could look it up, but it's huge. It's huge. ASU undergrad size. Let me quick look this up, see what they got. 65,000 ballpark. Lucas, you and 65,000 other friends. That's a whole lot of people. That's a whole lot of people. Okay, well, I love the network stuff. I love the people, kind of the socializing. I think you already know a little bit or think you know. A lot of people change. I'm not saying you will, but what you talked about earlier, kind of your major or your focus that you're planning to go for. Yeah, sure. I'm majoring the actual title of the majors, something longer and complicated, but it's essentially a pre-law major looking to the goal is to become a lawyer or work somewhere in the law space where I'm still figuring out what that's going to look like, whether it's corporate or government or I mean, there's a zillion different types of law you can go into, but it's law for now and we'll see if trying to figure out where it actually will end up but yeah right now it's long Yep, Do you mind tilting your, we'd love to see your chin. Thank you. Wonderful. We can get that out. Yeah, law. Well, and I think we had another episode on this podcast of Your AI Roadmap about law and kind of what the role of lawyers in the future will be. Like how much can AI do some paper stuff, you know, and then the lawyers. read things, refine things, et cetera. I don't know what that will or won't look like, but it seems like in a lot of fields and in law, there's a lot of menial work that is just again and again the same. um I talk about a very specific example of a company who like they were copying and pasting codes from PDFs. It was the full-time job of two humans to copy and paste codes on PDFs. Is that something like a fun job, Lucas? Is that something you do want to do? No, that does not pique my interest. No, and I don't I doubt it was a fun job and anyway job that had to be done at that firm um Okay, so college let's go back and think about high school because I remember a few years ago talking to your brother about like how to use AI do use AI Our teachers prepared for this adventure. How did you experience AI in the last few years at school? Yeah, it's definitely... it definitely changed, so... I obviously just graduated college, so when I went as a freshman, or not college, excuse me, high school, uh but when as a freshman, uh AI was not on the mind of anybody, and that was four years ago, so not that long ago. We were just getting out of the pandemic, but no one was thinking about AI. We were getting into college, or high school, jeez. um But as I progressed towards middle to the end of sophomore year, so two and a half, three years ago, it got... it kinda came up and it still wasn't, mean no one was really using it at that point, it was just something you occasionally heard about. And then really last year, and as we've gotten closer and closer today, it's just become more and more of a thing. And there was even a debate at our school about should it be blocked on the school browser or should AI be allowed to be used by the kids? And it's still ongoing, I don't know if they've actually come to a decision. Through my senior year it was, blocked for the first three months and then unblocked it for the rest of the way. But, I mean, it's a question you have to ask and different teachers feel differently about it. And I'd definitely be interested to hear your opinion on it with what you would accept, kind of, what you would think would be acceptable for students. But I think it was different with every kid, how much they utilized it in their kind of workflow. Totally. Well, it's interesting to hear about school computers and is it allowed and who decides. Absolutely. Oh, I mean, it's hard because the way I see it and thank goodness I'm done with school, right? got it, got it. BA, BFA, MA and PhD and I'm done. I about going for that MBA, but honestly just doing the work is how you get my, I think, degree. um what we do in school today, and maybe your degree will be different from mine. So like the school, school, college, higher ed, whatever, and then jobs. And then what like actually makes you money, relatively divorced in our society, the way I see it. And so I saw an ad actually recently, Lucas of like, get your kid to use an iPad. Like with using an iPad, you can learn from anywhere. And I was like, who needs to learn long division? Like, I ended that the advertisement seemed, and I'm not a parent, so I don't know, but I was just like, when I think about what makes us human and what is helpful for the next few years, as you mentioned, the network, the people. Empathy, truly listening, huge differentiator in the rooms I'm in, huge differentiator. You'll actually listen to what people are saying. You respond critically. You've read the material. You prepare for the meeting, right? You can make the banter or like all of those quote soft skills can be some of the biggest differentiators. Now you still got to get the paperwork done, close the deal, blah, blah, know, execute the work, but like. in a world where we have these tools, people are gonna be using these tools in the real world too. I mean, I want people to think critically, but I can't like force people, you must think critically. Like every email, every memo, like it's a really, um but I've people like brain drain or like people are just getting stupider. I had another colleague send me one of these articles, Joan, what do you think? Is everyone just getting stupid? But I really... Like I'm saying, I think these things are completely separated. And so to say like it's ruining school or changing school or should it be on school browsers? I'm like, it's a tool. We have access. Like how can it augment help? Copilot is a phrase used often. hopefully, I mean, I think Lucas, if you went through school and you only, AI did all your homework, you did really spot. Yeah, that wouldn't be good. Absolutely. I think that's a struggle that we all kind of had to battle with ourselves is, all right, we need to still apply ourselves and make sure that we're learning and making good use of our free public education. But at the same time, you know we might have something else going on or we might have a huge amount of homework tonight is where can AI help me maybe condense this we might not it's not doing the whole thing but can we condense it down to a point where we're still getting ninety ninety five percent of the valuable information but in a fraction of the time. And that's where I think it was most efficient. It's not writing your final English paper or something like that, but summarizing, helping annotate little things that would take you longer periods of time that you can condense down and still retain a really strong amount of the information. I think that's where it's been most useful. Definitely finding the right citation, made that summarization. Yeah, and I mean, I totally get, I I used AI tooling every day. What was I just doing for this? Customer work with lot of AI. But I also think like deep reading or long form stuff still is like pretty, as we're joking about like people getting stupider, but like, okay, here's an example. I thought of you the other day, because I'm prepping for this call. I was, my business coach was talking to me about like this idea about identity and fixed identities that can be really unhelpful to us. Like I'm a runner, I love running and then your leg breaks and can't run for six months. People's identities have real troubles. I don't know if you've seen this in your, for different various things, but there was, she said what might be more helpful is like, I love moving my body. You why not go swimming instead? or play with your dog. There's so many ways to adapt that fixed identity. This is relevant because a few years ago I read James Clear's book and in one of the last chapters it says, great book, great book, Atomic Habits. I wanna say chapter 11, chapter 12 out of like 15, try not to have a fixed identity, continue this forward growth. Now I read that book and all of it on paper maybe three to five years ago and that idea had not. like what Bren brought to the forefront in a long time. But when she said it, I was like, oh, that rings true. Reminds me of James Clear. And if I'd read just the summary notes, would not have gotten that nugget from years gone by. So I guess this goes back to like, what are we consuming? Like what's worth talking? Like how do you think about kind of like, and you mentioned like, homework's due tomorrow or there's a quiz. Like there's this immediacy need. but also what is worth that long-term brain investment? What do you think? I think you talked about reading. think reading is definitely something that it's kind of faded out of daily life. And reading is, it's not something that just AI can do for you. And reading will really help you grow your intelligence and you'll find little things like that that'll come up again and again. And it's just kind of light bulb moments where it really kind of changes how you think. But when it comes to schoolwork, ah obviously those are two different things, but schoolwork. Especially when you're in a time crunch That's it's a difficult question of how much do I want to apply AI? And it's I mean that's not just work It's everything and I mean this is not I mean you and I are talking about this But I mean like the leading minds in the world are contemplating the same question and they don't know the answer either So it's it's difficult, but I think as long as yours you still just have to be able to push yourself. Hopefully You see focus for long periods of time But, I mean, there's gonna be times where AI might need to pick up a little slack for you, and I think that's a good use of AI. ah As long as it's supplementing and not just doing what you're supposed to be doing in its entirety. And I think that's, mean, another example of this that I'm like, I wish we had used AI. My book, I was not allowed to, it's actually in my contract. You cannot use AI related to the book that I just published Well, it's good. I mean, it's written by human and 12 editors going over my work. um But like, there are some typos, no offense to Wiley. We all tried our best. There are a few typos and there are a like extra spaces, you know, in the situation. And I was like, If we had used an AI tool, would have removed that formatting thing. It could have been literally done in a click of a button. And so part of me is like, heartbreak? But what is that auto-correct versus some of it's written exactly the way I talk. So it's very, very human. There's also another ad I saw and I thought of you. Apple is doing more like synthesis. There was this advertisement of a kid. Why am I getting so many education ads? Don't know. There's this kid in college who is like, oh no, I don't want to pull an all-nighter. like Apple's like, here are like three summary items that you got in there, which is super cool. And if you're pulling an all-nighter, they're not fun, don't do it. Those three items may be helpful, but again, are you going to retain the content? Will you wow your professor with the same three summary points as everybody else? No. I mean if your goal is a B minus C, works great. But I mean if you're shooting for a higher grade, think it can help you study for sure, but maybe use AI to give you a more in-depth look and kind of add to it. So maybe you read the passage. and then you ask AI what it thought so now you have two perspectives instead of just AI's little three point perspective and that way you're adding to your learning instead of replacing with a poor man's substitute of what you could have read yourself but in a time crunch, you know, it could be tough Or could it plan it out so it's on your calendar, like reminder to schedule to study? But also like what are the five things that most people miss about this article that are going to come to me on the quiz tomorrow? That's true. Exactly. That could be really helpful. What do most people not see? There you go. What's the thing related to this core? I mean, well, that's actually when I used studying circa, studying French, circa middle school, the teacher would always put in something totally ridiculous, totally. And so I got to the point where I studied, I'm like, this is the main stuff that's gonna be on the exam. What's the secret stuff that she's gonna try to throw people off? So I'd like search for the secret stuff. And it was a great way to study once I realized that was her methods. Okay, back to, I haven't studied in a while. Um, yeah, I've been used to school. Okay, so it's 2025. If you graduate in four, you'll get out, you'll graduate with your degree in 2029. Whoa, and I always see all these like 2030, like life will be. Um, when you think about kind of jobs of the future, how you would love to have maybe a legal career, circa 2029 and beyond, and how do you envision that? I mean, I'll give you my best shot. I don't know the future. Not a fortune teller, but I'll give you a guess. I think it'll be all about being very malleable. adaptable. mean, nobody knows what it's going to look like in five years. If we went back five years, no one would tell you that this is what our world will look Maybe a couple people would, but they're probably just guessing and we're lucky. Because no one really knows what it's going to be. But you just have to be open to new options, open to just doing what is necessary to be successful, have a job, contribute to society. I'm sure it's still going to be accessible. It's just you might have to do some things you didn't think you were going to have to do. mean, you might have to. Some people thought, okay, I can go whole career and maybe use AI a little, but not implement it into my everyday life. And it's helping me do all sorts of things, but you might have to do that. you know, you just, there's, there's a zillion different things that could happen, but I think you're just going to have to be really adaptable and just whatever it is, do your best and see how. far that can take you because I mean there's a lot of people out there that aren't adaptable so if they lose their jobs there'll be some openings. Right, well I think it's the uh people who don't use AI and then people who use AI, and which ones do you think will be still employed? Although this, like, scary tactics. Yeah, that's interesting. I would probably say more people that use AI, but I mean, don't think every single person that doesn't use AI is going to be homeless or be unemployed. I think that there'll be less of them with jobs, but I mean, there'll be some that are entrenched higher up in different corporate ladders and things like that, and they're going to be able to manage the rest of their careers without using it. But I think for the most part, implementing AI will probably be almost a necessity by 2029, 2020, 2030. Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me a little bit of the COVID years also, when things were being more digitized. I'm not going to say who in my life, but I know a professor who was like, all your curriculum, every course you ever teach is now going to be digitized to be ready for remote and hybrid learning. And this person was like, actually, I'd prefer to retire. Actually, that's so much work. Actually, hard pass. This person was in position to do that, right? But all the same, no, but I think I'm just gonna go back to legal just for examples here because I have a lawyer, Lucas, I have a business, so have a lawyer in shocker. Gotta keep yourself protected. And someone actually sent me a paperwork. They're like, oh, let's not include the lawyers. Let's get paperwork out of Claude. And I was like, whoa, red flags. We could get a draft or some sample language and then send it to the lawyers. But there were yellow flags and there were red flags. But then I also was benchmarking against, I pay my lawyer pretty well hourly. We have a different retainer style, but just mailing my lawyer is a certain dollar sign. And what that time is worth, and I do believe that people unfortunately are signing contracts that Claude and Chachi BT made. I bet you they are. probably not the smartest. At least right now. Maybe in four or five years they'll be able to write great legal contracts, but right now, probably wouldn't recommend that. can't really recommend that. I would agree. I would agree. But I was thinking of like the human brain power of like being an expert, like reviewing legal documents and like, will you eventually have, you know, your AI bot review some things and like flag read, you know, some language like, uh-oh, this is section seven. Got to review section seven with a fine tooth comb. You know, here's problematic language. I don't know how it's going to work into my knowledge. My lawyer uses no AI. Shout out to my lawyer, not gonna use name. um But it's gonna be a very interesting, like I was, I realized I wanted to benchmark a different process than even contacting him, because it's really, really expensive. Maybe not fair. Lawyer, I reach out to you when I need it, I promise. You'll listen to this podcast. But um I think that's gonna be a lot of different, know, medical fields, legal fields, maybe research, business stuff. I don't know, I don't know. Okay, what are you most excited about for college? I'm just looking forward to meeting new people. I'm looking forward to kind of being, so I went far away from home and I'm kind of just being, I'm looking forward to kind of getting tossed into the deep end and surviving for myself. I'm trying to make a successful four years and just build some connections and have some economic success hopefully and it should be a good four years, good launch pad to start a career is the hope. I like that. I like that. The joke I've made previously with certain has been my experience is like technical skills get me in the door and soft skills help me rise. That's genius, yeah, I like that a lot. It's really what I've experienced because you like to get to be the candidate that gets in the door, right? They want to see that CV. They want to see the skills. But like to go up in leadership, manager opportunities, better opportunities, head of VP, blah, blah. You got to have some social acumen. In classes, I'm guessing you're going to get more of that technical, you know, whatever technical means for your field. Sure. What about that soft skills? How do think you're going to work on those? So yeah, thought that was a point I was gonna try to incorporate somewhere, but I thought you highlighted that really well. That's something I don't really think AI can replace. mean, maybe eventually, but I don't think that's in the near future. I leadership, emotional intelligence, things of that sort, it's gonna be tough for AI to replace anytime soon. And for that, think the only way to truly learn that, I mean, you can read about it, but... To me the only way to truly learn that is you gotta get yourself experienced. So whether that's joining a club, organizing an event, just talking to people, socialize, meet with people, build connections, and that way you'll have a long list of contacts where if you need a favor or need help with something, they'll be there and they'll trust you because you'll have this background that you've built from all those times and experiences. And I think that you've highlighted that and that's just critical to success in pretty much every facet of society. For sure, for sure. I don't know if you've read my book. I think you might have a copy. But there's a whole chapter called People, People, People, because that's how much it Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't require me. I'm getting to it. did read the summary, I have not I will be reading it shortly. I'm looking forward to it. of the people, I I heard this early in my career, relatively early. My mentor told me, like, it's about the people. And I was like, sure. Like, oh, like it's about the research dynamic. It's about how well I can clean a data set. It's about this, that, and the other. It's about the people. I have thanked him. I don't think I've thanked him enough, that dear mentor. But like, you know, when you have something go wrong, Like something recently went very, wrong at work. Someone picks up the phone and calls me. AI, is it gonna really help me? I mean, maybe like on the side, like trying to like, like, hear some things to say so it doesn't escalate more. But like at the end of it, the reason they call you on the phone is nothing related to AI, specifically in this context, you know, when they're emotional, big upsets. So there's human skills. All the human skills. well, yeah, lab, we're talking about careers, we're talking about life. You mentioned economic success. I'm not gonna push you hard on this one. I know it can be a delicate topic, but when you think about kind of what you want for your own roadmap of life, how do you think about taking care of yourself? Yeah, mean, I think taking care of yourself is key, it's important. I think for me, I don't know how I can implement AI into this, but I try to get up pretty early, eat healthy, exercise, those are the things that are gonna keep you healthy. And I think we're all social animals, so interact with people, and that'll help you laugh. Those type of things will... We'll keep you uh in good spirits and hopefully bring good health. I'm not a doctor though, so don't take it as medical advice. of doctor. Yes. No, I hear you. And I think that especially in a utopian version of what we're talking about, work gets more efficient and we get to take care of our bodies more and are on back-to-back Zoom calls like I am. this has been really delightful, Lupus. Thank you so much for your time. And any last notes, anything we didn't cover you want to mention? Yeah, I actually have a question for you. So I know you said you have some listeners that are kind of my age. going into my, I'm going to be a freshman in college, but anyone around my age, what would be maybe not just one or two AI tools you would recommend to us that we probably haven't heard of before? Ooh, okay, okay, questions from me. um tools you haven't heard before. All right, so you are actually in an episode, Lucas, for people who just graduated, because I got so many DMs from parents, actually. No, I didn't want to tell you about it, because um parents are like, my kid is in the basement. Things aren't good. um What I recommend. So for tools and things, what can I say? I am a huge fan of Claude. We mentioned Claude earlier today, Anthropic's product. It's like a Ferrari compared to the Subaru of ChatGPT BT. All right. Yeah, it's good stuff. As far as like, read this, give me feedback. I was doing a, it's not the same example, but I was doing a customer proposal recently and Claude was like, this is technically correct, but it will fail. This project will fail. And here's why. I'm like, darn it Claude. um What type of tool, especially for in your education, thinking about like, hey, what will the... What might the professor ask? Like honestly though, I maximize going to office hours and stuff. All the social things you're talking about, it's built in. You're legit paying for it, right? So like make sure to optimize that. uh Tools like SoFi and other ones on the finance side that do all these cool automations. I don't know if you've heard of SoFi before or otherwise. Not yet. You asked for tools you hadn't heard of before. So here we go. that's good, you're answering the question. Yeah, but like uh knowing what upcoming uh Wi-Fi bills are, seeing weird transactions. You're like, wait a minute, I didn't put how much money for pizza last night. All these different things that you can see those and it has these beautiful graphs and you can automate investing, know, investing early and often, things like that. So tools like that that make, they didn't exist when I was your age, did not exist. And like the low lift of being like, this is so easy. to do the right thing, you know what I mean? um So Claude, Sofi, I'll have to think of like, yeah, but those are the two off the top of my head that's like, I recommend folks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Other, I'm just so excited for you. I think you're gonna have such a ball, but I hope you like also remember their school. Like there's gotta be a good balance for that. Yes. Yeah, I'm excited. I it should be good. Hopefully I can utilize AI to help me succeed. It will. wild hour of the day and you're like, oh, Joan was like, maybe I should read this, but I went to this event and then like, happened? We'll maybe use that prompt. What will my professor ask that I am not thinking of right now? Claude and not Cheshire Pt. plot. As of today, we're recording this in July 2025, you can have a certain number of prompts free per day. I think it's like six, depending on... hopefully I don't need more than six. That probably, I mean as of right now, I mean I'm sure you'd get to a point where I would need a lot more than that, but as of right now, that's great. That's awesome. Cool. All right, Lucas, well, it was great talking to you. Thank you so much for giving us so much of your time. I really appreciate your perspective and honestly, props to your socialization through the pandemic. I'm happy for you. Thank you, thank you for having me, it was a blast. Cool. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Bye John.

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Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek

Host
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Lucas Bajorek

Guest

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