Education

Conor Grennan, NYU Stern’s chief AI architect and CEO of AI Mindset, is working to help educators use ChatGPT to make learning more vivid, memorable, and individualized without adding workload for teachers. His partnership with his teenage son Finn illustrates the approach: while studying 19th-century German immigration to New York, Finn used ChatGPT to roleplay a fictional immigrant and “walk” through mid-1800s Manhattan, turning historical facts into a lived narrative he could recall like a film scene. The same method can recast complex topics into tailored scenarios, from cell biology framed as a superhero story to Hamlet reimagined as a modern conversation, helping students connect emotionally and cognitively with the material. Grennan’s broader thesis is that conversational AI can finally make practical the kind of personalization classrooms have long wanted, aligning instruction to each student while keeping rigorous content intact.

Sean Harrington, who teaches AI and law at the University of Oklahoma and leads technology and innovation for the law school, is using ChatGPT to replace take-home exams with live, individualized assessment that reveals what students actually understand. He built a Socratic quizbot that ingests assigned readings and conducts a short one-on-one exchange with each student at the start of class, adapting questions in real time and producing transcripts that show how each student applies rules, distinguishes cases, and reasons through hypotheticals. The transcripts also function as a feedback loop for curriculum design, helping him adjust content based on student interest and confusion, and he has open-sourced the tool for other educators. Beyond assessment, Harrington uses GPT-based assistants to support legal-tech training and reduce administrative overhead, demonstrating how AI can preserve rigor while modernizing both instruction and operations.

Iowa State software engineering student Brandon Pieczka is moving fast, stacking heavy course loads, working part-time, and applying relentlessly for internships in a competitive job market. ChatGPT helps him convert that pressure into progress by filling the gaps when he misses lectures and by turning course notes into a responsive, personalized tutorial. He uploads materials, asks for clear explanations of difficult concepts, and uses back-and-forth questioning to test and correct his understanding as if he were in office hours. The result is practical leverage: he keeps pace with demanding classes while building career momentum, landing internships early and staying on track for an accelerated path into applied AI.

Micah Blum, a sophomore at American University double-majoring in Justice & Law and Finance, uses ChatGPT to manage competing academic demands while pursuing multiple career directions. He relies on the tool to tailor resumes and cover letters to distinct roles, surfacing the most relevant coursework and experiences for legal, finance, and campus safety positions, an approach he believes helped him land a public safety supervisor role. In class, ChatGPT supports research and writing by helping locate niche datasets, suggesting visualization approaches, and providing targeted feedback across essay drafts. For planning, it helps him estimate timelines and sequence tasks, while he keeps authorship and judgment firmly human, using AI to accelerate structure and focus without replacing his voice.