Is information overload making it hard for you to focus on what matters most at school? An essential part of college is reading and deeply understanding the information that will make you an expert in your field. However, today’s college students have exponentially more content to wade through – from textbooks, lecture notes and research papers to the entire internet! It’s easy to spend most of your time searching and not enough time actually learning the most important information. However, you don’t have to tackle this challenge on your own. Let a generative artificial intelligence (AI) assistant help you study smarter and learn more about what matters.
When used responsibly, AI can be a powerful study partner that can help students succeed. Check out six suggestions for using AI to maximize your studying and learning.
- Learning
In your college courses, you’ll run across dense learning materials. Academic articles and readings often have long blocks of dense text, tables and charts that can make remembering the key information really difficult.
AI assistants can summarize documents and create concise outlines that allow you to easily navigate and learn the information in even the most daunting documents. Armed with this new partner, you can spend more time closely reading, analyzing and understanding your course materials. You can also get AI tools to present the information in easier-to-understand language or summarize key themes so you can truly focus on what matters.
- Studying
When preparing for a quiz or test, it can be hard to know where to start. At times, it can be overwhelming! Don’t panic. Gather your lecture notes, handouts, texts, presentations and other relevant course documents and let AI do the admin for you.
AI can bring all the relevant documents together and organize the information by key themes, definitions and dates. AI can then use this information to generate practice quizzes, study guides and questions and answers you can paste into flashcards, so you can review the course materials and study more effectively.
- Brainstorming
Imagine this: You’re assigned a project, presentation or essay, and you’re struggling to come up with ideas on a specific theme. AI can be a valuable tool for brainstorming that can spark your imagination and help get you started.
Let’s say you’ve read a research report on the Fall of the Roman Empire and the next assignment is to present one of the paper’s major themes. AI tools can provide a list of potential themes to get you thinking – like instability, economic decline or overexpansion. From there, you can brainstorm more themes or ask the AI tool to locate examples of information around your chosen topic. AI can provide the information with citations so you can navigate to that section and read more.
- Class Presentations
Most people are at least a little uncomfortable presenting in front of their peers. AI can help you prepare for presentations. So when it’s your turn to present in class, you’ll be prepared for your professor’s and peers’ questions and feel more confident.
- Citations
Properly citing and attributing your sources is a cornerstone of academic work. When you’re writing or reading, different AI tools can include citations with clickable links so you can verify where the information came from in the document. Having these citations on hand also makes it easier for you to incorporate the information in your reports, essays and projects.
- Careers
Preparing and applying for career experiences starts in college. Whether you’re applying for an internship, postgraduate job or even a part-time job while in school, AI can support your career development.
For example, you are applying for an internship at a tech company. To stand out among the other applicants, you can use AI to analyze the internship role description and identify keywords, phrases and requirements. Then, let AI tools review your cover letter and resume to make sure you’ve included the application’s language and that you’ve highlighted all the pertinent skills needed for the role.
AI can be an incredible learning aid that can help you draw connections across your course materials, analyze key information, as well as practice ahead of big exams and presentations.
By: Brandpoint (Edited by d-mars.com)
