What is the prevalence of AI in the modern workforce and how should colleges be preparing their students for a system that values its usability? It is my personal belief that AI and the knowledge required to use and understand AI tools should be included in college curriculums in order to better ready its students for the real world. Having used LLMs in my own personal life as well as the content we’ve studied in our class, I have come to the conclusion that learning about AI and the best ways to utilize it is essential for students our age seeking employment in a world that increasingly supports AI knowledge. 

In terms of how I intend to use AI in the academic space, LLMs can and have been extremely helpful in terms of locating sources I would’ve never otherwise thought to have used and translating works that I wouldn’t have had access to beforehand. While the wider use of AI seems to be encouraged across the modern workforce, and I think that at least being able to navigate AI tools, proper prompting and the capabilities of both open and closed LLMs is an important skill to either emphasize or at least keep in reserve when searching for a job, in my own personal experience I have found the most success with having AI models and LLMs process large amounts of raw data as opposed to searching through it myself. Going forward, I plan to continue using LLMs in order to search for sources that are more obscure to me, “Zero-shot prompting involves providing the model with a direct instruction or question without any additional context or examples”, according to Google which would imply most of my success will come from useful information that can be gleaned from much more broad requests, especially considering most of my sources originate in non-english languages and therefore are primarily included on non-english speaking websites. In a similar fashion, I will also continue to use AI in order to translate said sources, as I’ve had more success using ChatGPT and Claude to translate certain PDFs and websites as opposed to Google Translate and my own translational abilities.

 As for a way I will not be utilizing AI for my particular needs, it will most likely be in regards to studying specific material for either quizzes or classes. Quoting the UT Ai Prompting Literacy Report, “As you write your prompts, you’ll need an understanding of the topic or domain you’re directing the GenAI toward. As you write your prompts, you’ll need an understanding of the topic or domain you’re directing the GenAI toward.” With the exception of closed LLMs, the tendency for AI to misreport information on specific requests leaves making study guides far too at risk for having misinformation to have them be worth it, whereas more general outlines that will already be reviewed by a human are much safer, as well as closed LLMs, which will only pull from pre-approved sources and thus have a much lower chance to give me bad information.

For my relic I have asked an LLM, specifically Google Gemini, if it is trustworthy as well as its response. It doesn’t outwardly appear to be hiding anything. It did only link its own setup as a response though.

Going forward, I will be paying more attention to which situations I use AI in and how I prompt effectively. With certain requests, LLMs won’t be as effective, such as needing specific information for studying materials. For other, more general requests however, LLMs seem to be a much more usable tool to get what I want.

Credits: University of Texas System. (2025, November). Prompt literacy. UT Aspire. Google Cloud. “Prompt Engineering: Overview and Guide.” Google Cloud, 4 May 2026, https://cloud.google.com/discover/what-is-prompt-engineering. 

Image is a screenshot of a Google Gemini Prompt generated by me