American University sophomore Micah Blum has two majors, many possible career paths, and one AI tool to help manage them all—ChatGPT.
Micah, a puzzle‑solver who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, is double‑majoring in Justice & Law, and Finance. With college classes now underway, Micah is balancing lectures, readings, and even shifts as a public safety officer on campus. And with his two different majors, he’s using ChatGPT to craft job applications for very different career paths.
“I’ve used ChatGPT to tailor resumes and cover letters from the start—it’s my most‑used function,” Micah says. For legal roles, he asks the model to emphasize attention to detail, fast‑paced administrative work, and relevant coursework such as Issues in American Law Enforcement, a class taught by a former MPD sergeant. For finance, he toggles in his finance internship, Excel and financial‑modeling skills. He also has the model identify the most relevant classes from his transcript for a given job description.
Micah believes this approach helped him land his current role as a public safety supervisor working at American University’s Office of Public Safety. For that role, he highlighted volunteer and logistics experience he doesn’t normally include on his base résumé, shifting the narrative toward campus operations and safety.
In the classroom, ChatGPT acts as “another voice to bounce ideas off.” It helped him find hard‑to‑locate traffic‑stop datasets for a research paper on racial bias and even guided him through how he could visualize the data. Before turning in essays—whether five pages or fifteen—he uploads successive drafts and the assignment details, and asks for targeted feedback to improve them. For time management, ChatGPT helps him estimate how long tasks will take and stacks small wins before tackling bigger projects.
Sophomore year has brought confidence. “I use [ChatGPT] beyond every day,” he says, but always with intention. Micah takes pride in his writing and keeps the human in the loop: AI to accelerate the search and structure, his judgment and powers of composition to write the words.
Micah’s north star is public service. He’s dreamt of working in law enforcement, ideally the FBI, since he was a boy. That tracks with the rest of his interests: detective thrillers, crossword puzzles, and solving brain teasers in his spare time.
For students with a broad skillset, Micah’s playbook is simple: keep the core story the same, but let ChatGPT help prioritize the experiences to surface.
