An undergraduate with a tutor in his pocket

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How an Iowa State student uses ChatGPT to keep up with a packed schedule and win early internships

Brandon Pieczka is a college student in a hurry. From his very first semester at Iowa State University, the stakes were clear: an advisor told him only 5% of freshman land internships, which are the best stepping stones to a full-time job. Now a sophomore and software engineering major, Brandon has used ChatGPT to turn job-market pressure into career momentum. For freshman year, Brandon arrived with transfer credits, stacked his schedule to the registrar’s 18‑credit cap, then tacked on a five‑credit physics course at a community college—completing the labs remotely from his dorm. By the second semester, he was working 15–20 hours a week, and spending another one to two hours most days firing off applications. By the end of freshman year, he’d beaten the odds by landing not one but two internships, first at John Deere and then at a Y Combinator startup. That pace came with a cost: he missed a few lectures. ChatGPT is how he catches up. Last spring, staring down a computer‑engineering exam on hardware and logic circuits, Pieczka fed the model the course’s lecture notes, asked it to explain the hardest concepts, and then tested his understanding: "What do I have right?" "What’s wrong?" "Am I on the right track?" For Brandon, the real revelation isn’t that ChatGPT knows the material he’s studying; rather, it’s how the tool adapts to how he learns, answering his questions and correcting him when his understanding doesn’t align with the material. Now he treats ChatGPT like standing office hours. When work pulls him from a lecture, he uploads the notes, and turns them in into a back‑and‑forth tutorial. “I can’t imagine not having a tutor in my pocket,” he says. Pieczka aims to graduate on a three-year plan and work in applied AI before diving deeper into AI research. The constraint is time, and that’s precisely where AI changes the math. For a student racing against a challenging job market, ChatGPT isn’t just a study aid; it’s the leverage that keeps him ahead of deadline.