#170 AI and College Essays: What Families Need to Know with Susan Knoppow Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker Robbins  00:57

with college application season approaching, many parents and students are wondering about AI tools in college essays. Can your teen use AI to help them with their college application essays? Should they the answers might surprise you in this digital age where AI writing tools are becoming increasingly accessible, knowing where to draw the line between helpful assistance and potential harm to your teens, application is crucial. I’m thrilled to welcome Susan Knoppow back to the show as a writing expert who brings clarity to this confusing topic. Susan co founded Wow writing workshop and developed the WoW method for teaching writing with her background as an executive speech writer, copywriter and published poet, she offers invaluable insights into authentic writing that stands out to admissions officers. Our conversation today will explore the current AI landscape for college essays, appropriate uses of technology in the application process and best practices to help your teen showcase their genuine voice rather than risk their application with AI generated content. We’ll also discuss the recent changes to the Common App essays that every parent of a college bound teen needs to know if you’re concerned about helping your teen navigate this tricky aspect of college applications without crossing ethical lines. Then this, my friend, is an episode that is essential listening. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right in to a great conversation. See Susan, welcome back to the show. You were here two years ago, almost to the day. Wow.

 

Susan Knoppow  02:49

Two years I probably had a different haircut, though,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  02:53

I have to look back and I’m so boring, I have the same haircut for sure. So we talked last time about, you know, all the bad advice out there about college essays, oh, and how little did we know that there would be more advice coming, and a lot of it around the use of AI in writing the college essay. So let’s dive into, like, what is really the appropriate use of AI, if any? I mean, you’re a writing specialist. This is all you do. I love that. Like all I do, I’m so singularly focused on the career development. All you do is just the writing piece. So we are two very specialized people here, not wearing a lot of different hats, and AI is probably the most confusing thing I would say to come in the last couple years. So let’s just start with, should students even utilize AI at all in writing college essays? So here’s

 

Susan Knoppow  03:54

what I have to say about that. First of all, thank you for having me, and I’m really pleased to be back. Artificial Intelligence is here. It’s in tools that students use right now. Okay, what is Grammarly, but artificial intelligence looking at your writing. What is spell check, but artificial intelligence looking at your writing. So to say that absolutely, we shouldn’t ever touch it is silly. That doesn’t make any sense. However, what we’re really talking about here is, should you put a question into a chat bot and have it write an essay for you? That’s question number one. Or should you take the essay you’ve written and put it into some AI tool and have it and quote, unquote, fix it for you? To both of those questions, I say absolutely not. And here’s why. If you were working for a company, let’s say you, Lisa, needed to write a blog for your website or an article, and you say, You know what, I’m a good writer, but I’m curious to see how I could polish my work. Yeah, whatever. You could put that into an AI tool and have it give you some suggestions. It’s that’s, there’s nothing wrong with that, just as you could give it to a. Colleague and ask them, could you rewrite this for me? I mean, I’m, I’m a professional writer. You could give it to me and say, Could you clean this up a little bit? That’s a reasonable use of an AI tool. I think, as a writer, that’s

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  05:14

just feedback, right? You’re just asking. I mean, we’ve done peer feedback, professional feedback, for years,

 

Susan Knoppow  05:20

but when a student does this for the purposes of anything for school or for college application, it’s not their work. And so the mistake I think people make in thinking about like, Well, why can’t I, you know, have an AI clean up my writing, because you’re applying to college, and part of what you’re doing when you apply to college is to say, This is who I am. This is me. This is all me. Now, can you have a conversation with a writing coach like me to talk about topics and strategy? Absolutely. Can you talk to someone like you about how I might position myself, because this is a major I’m interested in, or this is a career path I’m interested in, of course, because we’re experts in those things. Can you talk to your mother about maybe there’s some ideas you might not have thought of, you know, to include in your essays, absolutely. But the idea here is to reflect with people who know you. There’s nothing me out in the internet, all that that, all that an AI tool does is it goes out into the general internet, it finds similar kinds of information, and it reflects them back to you for an essay that’s saying, Tell us something about who you are beyond what you’ve accomplished, which is what the common app, personal statement, you know, in a nutshell, is doing. I’m not out there. There is no chat pot that can go I mean, I am out there. There’s blogs I’ve written, there’s articles, all kinds of things, but me as a person, I’m not out there. And so it’s, it’s almost like the question comes before understanding the task. So in our world, task number one is to understand the prompt. We have a 10 step process for writing college essays, and we use it with our students. We share it with their parents. We share it with our colleagues. We train people using this approach. It’s in our book, which is, I have a free copy of our book out that I put on the website for you. Step number one, understand the prompt. What are you doing, and why are you doing it. So what are you doing? You’re writing essays that go hand in hand with the rest of your application, which is a reflection of everything you’ve done in school, out of school, what kind of classes have you taken? What kind of work have you done? What kind of volunteering have you done? What activities have you done? It goes with that, and it’s an important piece of it, but it doesn’t stand alone. It’s not it’s not just a here’s a piece of writing. Here’s the best brochure about me that I could make. So in my world, if understand the prompt is step number one, there is nothing that AI can do that helps me answer that question. So I would say my big answer is no, the only time, and we can get into like more detail, because there’s a lot that people say about, you know, well, how do I tell my students not to do this? Or, how do I tell my kids not to do this? How do I police it? Are colleges, you know, using tools to find out if I’ve used AI. How will they know? But the only time I can think that AI could be a useful tool is if a student is writing an essay that asks that there’s a lot of schools that have supplements that say, Why do you want to come here? Why are you interested in this major? What is it about our program that appeals to you? You can use AI for research. There’s nothing, I believe. There’s nothing wrong with what does the University of X offer in terms of physics? Maybe I haven’t gotten deep enough into their catalog, or I tried to call a professor and I haven’t been able to connect with anyone. However, I say this with a caveat. Anything you find out there, check it. Yeah, do not take any AI information at face value, just as if you asked your cousin who went to that school six years ago. Oh, you should take Professor Smith. It turns out Professor Smith retired last year. Yeah, you should check your information. So that’s the only so far, that is the only thing I have found that AI could potentially be useful, saves that much time. Well,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  09:29

there are, you know, we were talking before we hit record, about a policy that, like when Georgia Tech changed computer science to direct, admit major and I’ve got something on my website under Resources, if families want to look at that. But you know, it took me, I said to you the first time, I was really looking for this five clicks to get to the right page. So your point of, well, it might pull something up that you just haven’t had the time or you’ve not clicked. Enough or ask the right ask the question the right way. But, like, I’ll give an example. I asked chat, G, P, T, last fall, I was trying to buy concert tickets, and I and it was a venue that I was unfamiliar with, and I was asking, I was having it compare two different places to say, like, Where might I have the best sound quality and the best view, right? Because I could see, looking at the map, I could see kind of positives to both. And it totally screwed it up. It assumed that that section, like, I forget what it was. It was like section 700 would be next to 800 when actually 800 was behind. 700 gave me complete misinformation. And I’m like, okay, abandon that. Just make your own choice. Lisa, so you, you do you have to take, I mean, if you find out for research, you gotta go make sure it’s correct over on their website, absolutely,

 

Susan Knoppow  10:58

absolutely. And there’s no I find. I tell my students this all the time, there is no substitute for talking to a human being, right? They there will always be someone who will talk to you, whether it’s a student or someone in admissions or someone in a department. If you’re persistent enough, you will find something sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s not easy, but you can always find a human being to talk to. Well, it’s interesting skill to learn, right? Uh,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  11:23

communication. Somebody asked me the other day about second a second major, like double majoring, and this was related to career aspirations and our so we do a monthly Q A with our career coaching course. And the question that they brought up about, you know, should I do a second major? I’m like, first of all, you’re in high school, you can’t even add a second major till you’re on campus. But I said to them, no, because employers, rather than adding another major or minor, they would rather you build either technical skills in that field or your soft skills, such as writing and speaking and things like that. So I agree with you, it’s good practice to just talk to somebody about it absolutely, you know, I think, like I do, use AI quite a bit, but in my content creation to help me improve it, you know, I will give AI the transcript from this conversation we’re having, and it will help with our show notes. It will help with our intro and our outro. And it knows me a little bit better because I’m using it every single day. No teenager is using it every single day to get to know them,

 

Susan Knoppow  12:37

right? Well, it’s, and that’s, if it’s doing anything, it’s, here’s my writing, right? You’re saying is, here’s something I’ve created, yeah, help me polish it for a student for a college application. The question is, Who are you telling? That’s right? And tell us in your own voice and in your own words. So what we do is, once the student understands the prompt and we we confirm that. I mean, we have writing exercise where we ask them questions, and our coaches are trained to reflect back and make sure they understand the prompt before they even start coming up with topic ideas. Because often students dive in, they don’t understand the prompt. They think that the idea is to show how unique and special they are, which is actually not the purpose. And I ask admissions officers all the time, you know, what do you want me to tell my students? And they say, will you tell them to answer the question? They’re trying really hard to, like, blow me away with their creative answers. And I really have a question, and I would like them to answer it, and especially when it comes to supplements, but also with the personal statement, who are you beyond grades and scores? And tell me anything, give me some positive characteristic and show me how you’ve demonstrated that in the world. And that is a task. Any student who is applying to a school that asks that question is qualified to answer it. If they really, really, really can’t answer it, then they need a different kind of school. There’s lots of colleges in the world require essays. Yes, that’s important to keep in mind as well. A student might say, Oh, I’m not a good writer. I’ll put my essay into a chat bot and ask it to edit for me, and I say, if your writing skills are not as strong as you’d like them to be, then you need to develop them. Go to a school with a great writing center. It’s okay. And also, you don’t have to be a spectacular writer to get into a top university. You can certainly go to a great college and be an adequate writer and develop your skills further

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  14:41

once you get there. I have students say to me all the time, and this is related to when we’re talking about majors or careers. Well, I you know, we’re looking at their hardwired personality, and I’m giving them suggestions like, Hey, you might really want to like research and go do a job shadow or an informational interview on this particular career. Well, I. Know how I would do that. I don’t know anything about that field. I’m like, that’s why we go to college. We’re going to college to learn the skills we’re just trying to say, does it feel like it would fit you? Same thing, like you’re saying, like you don’t have to be the world’s best writer, so don’t put all this pressure on yourself to have this perfect, polished essay, because that’s they’re just looking to get to know you exactly so. And we should say you you have referenced like you’ve got. You’re giving away a free copy of your book. You share what the 10 steps are to getting to a great essay. We’ve got those for everybody. We made it really easy. Susan has this is just for our listeners. A special landing page at flourish coaching co.com, forward slash essays. And if you go there, you can download the resources that she’s mentioning today. So she’s been very generous every every year she gives me resources for our students. So I have a question, you know, you it’s funny. We talk about how, gosh, AI just came, you know, came on two years ago, and how it’s new, and it’s changing things, and it is, but you made a really good point. Grammarly has been around for a very long time. I don’t want to say forever. Spell check has been around for a very long time. That was AI, even though we didn’t necessarily call it that or think about it in that way. So from a you’ve been talking about, like development of content in message, but from a mechanics side of things, proper grammar, proper spelling, maybe it may be a little bit flow, or whatever does Grammarly is, is that a no, no? I mean, what is the moral and ethics? Because it’s funny. Like, three years ago, we didn’t really question students using Grammarly to help correct the mechanical errors. But now, could that create problems? I

 

Susan Knoppow  17:02

don’t think so. So here’s how I feel about Grammarly. You also have to question Grammarly. Yeah, you know, a bank of rules. I’m a professional writer. I’m an excellent teacher. I’m a great editor. When I use Grammarly, an org a grammar check and it makes corrections, I take them with a grain of salt. I take half of them because some of them are not what I meant. So when I and I say the same thing with spell check, I may have mangled my typing. If I just accept, accept, accept, accept. It doesn’t know what I meant. So I say, I say the same thing about spell check. If you know that you’re not a great speller, spell check has been for our students now. Spell Check has been around since they were in kindergarten, way before, right? So it’s a tool that they’ve probably grown up with. The little squiggly line under the thing you wrote the little red line, yeah, pay attention to it. Definitely use it as a tool, but always make sure that it’s correcting what you want it to correct. Same thing with grammar checkers. I turn them off now they drive me nuts, because half the time it gives me something that may be grammatically correct, but it’s not really how I want to say something. And because I know the rules of grammar, and because I know that they were meant to be broken. I decide when I’m going to break them. So I don’t feel that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, but I think it would be as though you gave your essay to your dad and he changed seven sentences and you just said, Okay, accept, accept, accept. You have to look. Why did he want you to make those changes. What is it that you didn’t communicate? Well, is he just trying to polish it and make it sound more like a 45 year old lawyer? Well, you don’t take that change. Yeah. Is he saying this is unclear? I think you need to divide this into two sentences, a helpful comment from an adult to a student.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  18:58

I was writing something yesterday on a Google Doc, and I’ve got, I have the paid Grammarly pro whatever, and I always look because it wanted me to add a comma and remove a word from a sentence, and so I looked at how that would change The sentence. It totally changed the meaning of the sentence, and it was not correct any longer for what I was writing. And it would have been like a reader would have been like, what does this mean? Where did that come from? Now it was grammatically correct. The change that they wanted to make my sentence was not incorrect. Their suggestion was going to make my content

 

Susan Knoppow  19:42

bad. So that’s interesting that you say that, because one of the things that we teach and that we do with our students, for us, I said there’s 10 steps for us. That’s Step nine, Step eight, or eight or nine, where we say now, so the first six steps are all about content, content, content. Making sure we’re developing content, that it’s complete, that I understand what you’re talking about and why you’re telling me this. Then we get to structure and polish, and we’ve taught our coaches internally, and I have taught hundreds of my colleagues at that point, the comment you make is this sentence is unclear. Please tell me what you mean and read this out loud and correct it so that it’s more clear. Not, I want you to make this, you know, make this change. I’m going to cut the sentence here, I’m going to add a com. I’m going to remove this word for just that reason, because I may be misinterpreting. Well, I’ve done it. I know years and years ago I’d be like, No, we’re going to revise the sentence. And then the student would say, but that’s not what I meant. I said, You know what my job is, to reflect, to comment, to tell you what I observe, to ask you questions and then to help you clarify.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  20:53

Yeah, like, that’s what, this is, what this hate. Is this what you meant to say in this sentence? This is what I’m taking it as. Is that the heart of what you’re trying to say, and if they say no, then you said something. So this goes on the whole like Grammarly spell check, is it? Is it allowable? You said earlier that grammar rules were made to be broken. And I would love to hear a little bit more about that, because I do think in the you know, the temptation to use AI to help you write or revise, which we’ve already said, no, no, no, no, no, um is because you want to be polished and great. And so for you to say grammar rules are made to be broken. That also pulls back from anybody who’s trying to be perfectionistic or super polished. Can we talk a little bit more about that, like, yes, what does that mean, and is that good, and is that helpful in a college essay? So this is, this is actually

 

Susan Knoppow  21:56

my favorite new grammar book. It’s called, says who it’s by Anne kurzan. I don’t know if she’s the current dean of the English department the University of Michigan, but when she wrote this book, she was, I know that Deans rotate through, so I could be, yeah, maybe she’s not. Right now, don’t hold

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  22:13

us to it. She is

 

Susan Knoppow  22:15

a linguist. She is an English professor. I mean, if anyone knows the English language, it’s Anne Curzon. In her book, she says, Look, every rule you can break them, and every chapter is about some sort of grammar, usage, convention and where and when, where it came from. The history is fascinating. Like, why do we say, you know, you can’t put a proposition at the end of a sentence. Well, it’s because of x. But can you? Of course you can we talk that way, we write that way. There’s nothing better or worse. So what I’m saying to my students is, don’t break them because you’re lazy. Don’t Don’t ignore them because you don’t feel like learning them. But know that it’s not this is not the most important thing, especially in a college essay. You don’t have to be a perfect writer. You have to be a good communicator. You have to make sure that when you when, when your reader puts the essay aside and goes on to the next part of your application, they’ve learned something about you, and whether you’re semi colons in the right place or not is probably not the biggest thing. I’ve asked admissions officers, do you pay attention to this? And they say, Are you kidding? I don’t have time for that. It’s not what I’m Yeah. I mean, if it’s if there’s no if there are no paragraphs and there’s no punctuation and you never use a capital letter, they may say, This person doesn’t know the basic rules of written English, and they probably won’t succeed on my campus. And I can’t, in good you know, in good conscience, admit them. But I think that the idea that there has to be perfect writing and perfect topic and perfect execution takes away from what really is at the heart of writing these essays, which is it’s an opportunity to share quantitative, qualitative information in an application that has a lot of quantitative data in it, there’s a lot of lists and numbers, and how many of these, and how many classes, and where did your parents go to college, and all kinds of things. Where do

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  24:19

you numbers and ranking. And, yeah,

 

Susan Knoppow  24:21

there’s all kinds of things that are easy to measure and quantify. It is really hard to quantify. I have seven students who seem like they’d be good problem solvers, and 12 who are really resilient, and 16 who are creative, and there’s no ranking. They’re not saying I’m looking for six, you know, like I’m looking for six mathematicians who are creative and 17 resilient English people, but, but this is an opportunity to say, This is who I am. You’ve got 100 applicants who are from, you know, from Ohio, and play the flute and took three AP classes and. Went to rigorous high schools. This is who I am. This is the kind of person I am. And I feel like when, when we can get our students to relax and we lower the stakes, they do so much better.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  25:13

Well, it’s interesting, you know? It’s we use the Berkman personality assessment our college major and career coaching course, and it gives us like, 44 data points on personality, 3.5 million plus people have taken it. And what Berkman says to us, and we have some episode episodes about this on our podcast, but they say no two people are wired the exact same. And as I say that, the reason I bring that up is it’s those nuances that make you like I look at my dad’s Berkman 44 data points, and I look at mine, and there are a lot of similar like, the Apple did not fall far from that tree. However, there are about three or four really stark differences in who we are, and that really makes a difference in how we show up in the world. And so what you’re really saying is that data set, flute, Ohio, AP, AC, t score, we can find a lot of kids that have the same stats. We’re looking for those little tweaks, those little nuances of you to show up right exactly,

 

Susan Knoppow  26:24

and you don’t have to present a certain picture. It’s not like this quality is better than the people ask me all the time, like, well, what they want is what right they want leadership and problem solving. And I say, Are you a leader? No, not so much. Are you a really good team player? Yeah, I’m great. You want me on your, you know, in your group, I’m just not going to be the leader. Cool. We need people like that. Are you an amazing Problem Solver sometimes, but I really creative, and I say that’s just as good. You don’t have to create a persona that you think will be, you know, appealing to your reader, you need to answer the question and show who you really are. Because no matter the school, whether it’s tiny or huge, they’re trying to develop. They’re trying to create a class. Yeah, they’re trying to create a community. They need a lot of different kinds of people in that community. There’s certain types that will do better or worse in certain programs and certain campuses. But I tell my students, if you have a good list, if you have a list of schools that you’re interested in, that you’re qualified for, they can be a little bit of a reach. They can be a little bit easy. It doesn’t matter. But if, basically, these are schools that you could get into and do well at your essays are just reinforcing the work you’ve already done. To make this list of

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  27:46

schools, let me add so you’re Yeah, you’re hitting on, like we’ve been talking about, like, what admissions officers want, and they don’t want it to be too polished. They want it to be authentic. You know, another one I would add to that is they don’t want you to choose big, flowery words. They want you to to write as a 17 or 18 year old would write. So we’re talking about things that they want. Do you know as you interact with them? Because I know you do a lot, how are they policing this? So let’s go back to this AI piece we’ve already said, not really appropriate to use, and if that, if us just saying no, don’t do it isn’t enough for you. Okay, well, let’s scare you a little bit.

 

Susan Knoppow  28:29

So here’s the truth. So I was at a conference. I was at a the National Association for college admission counseling in the fall, and AI and college essays was like the topic everybody’s talking about it. There’s all kinds of apps. There’s all kinds of new websites that use AI that tell you, you know, how it’s going to help you have the greatest essay there, the Princeton Review has a new AI tool that, you know, I’m sure they spent a lot of money creating, that helps you do the two things that I think you shouldn’t use AI for, which is, one is pick a topic, and two is polish your essay. So I don’t agree with their approach. There was a whole panel of very distinguished people who I respect a lot, from schools, high school, college, I think, an independent consultant talking about all the ways they use AI. And I listened, and also I’m getting to the answer to your question about policing, and all I heard was reinforcing practices that I don’t think are good practices for human beings, let alone for AI. So like people who ask 1000 questions because they think there’s some perfect jewel of a topic, and if they only got to know the students so deeply they, as the counselor, would stumble upon this amazing topic, or that the student would if they only answered, you know, 17 pages of survey questions. I have a very brief exercise. I have them spend about an hour doing a couple of writing exercises, watching video, reading a web page, answering some questions, and then they have a conversation. In with a trained coach. So to get to your question about policing the admissions people that I heard speak at that conference, so I’m saying is that AI is out there, students, you’re going to find it. People are going to tell you, it’s the magical way shapes and forms. It’s out there for you. So you can listen to me or not listening to me, but the admissions people who spoke about it, I heard a couple, and I don’t remember exactly which schools they were, who said, Yes, we’re paying attention. And most of them said, I have real things to worry about. I’m not putting your essay through some AI checker and frequently, counselors will put their students essays through some kind of AI Checker tool, and essays that were written by real students with no ace support are getting flagged. I’ve seen that as having AI and because there’s phrases that people use that are so common,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  30:59

well, I’ve also heard just accepting that Grammarly could could give a false positive where it was aI written and it wasn’t

 

Susan Knoppow  31:10

see. I don’t know about that. I’ll have to check into it. I actually, I heard that

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  31:13

with somebody from their English class. It was a high school student, so this wasn’t admissions, yeah, but that grammar something the student, at least insisted, this is what, this is the story. It was not my student, and it was an IEC who was talking about their students experience at their school. And it went through a checker. And ultimately, the IEC really felt because the student wrote in a Google Doc. So there were, you know, in a Google Doc, you can go back and see the history, right, and you could see, like the kid was in it for this amount of time, and they were making this tweet it, it really showed that the kid was working on it, and it got flagged. That’s actually how the kid proved to the school that it wasn’t AI written. It was their own original work. So, something to be said for Google and the history of a document.

 

Susan Knoppow  32:02

I think the tools, I think the tools that are out there for policing it are not as well developed as they could be. I think that you know when you’re when. So two years ago, yeah, it’s two years ago, March of 2023, I remember chatgpt explodes on the scene. And I did a webinar for professionals about everyone was calling. Oh my god. What am I going to do? How to suspect essays. And I did a session. Then two years ago, when you know, G P t3 it wasn’t even as advanced as it was six months later, that by the time I did the session, it was like a month after it all come out, half of what I already knew was out of date because it kept quickly. But my message then, whether it’s for counselors or independent consultants or students or parents or English teachers, is the same as it was then, which is, these are tools. They will become part of our lives. They will. Students are going to have just as we taught students 20 years ago, 30 years ago, how to use the internet intelligently and not just accept everything. You see, artificial intelligence is here. We don’t quite know what it is or how it works, or how we’re going to use it. We’re going to look back on these, you know, the 2020s and say, wow, we really didn’t know we were talking about because it’s not fully developed. So I see two threads. One is the warning, you know, scare the kids. Don’t use it. Don’t use it, you’ll get in trouble. And the second is policing people, trying to say, you know, did my kid use it? I should, you know, I need to catch it. I don’t think either of those approaches are really a good use of our time and energy. I’m going to go back to what I said before. A good use of our time and energy is making sure students read the prompts, understand how essays fit into an application. Look, kids are going to cheat. Are going to cheat. Their sister is going to write their essay, their aunt is going to write their essay. They’re going to copy someone. I mean, those are real things that happen. They do happen. Their dad is going to rewrite it before they submit it. I don’t like that those things happen, but I don’t pretend that they don’t, and I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it, because I think they’re outlier, they’re they’re outliers, they’re not the norm, most students are honest and take this task seriously and use their own words and get help when they need some help, and submit writing that they produced and so well, I really stay on top of what’s going on with AI and college essays. Like I said, there’s all kinds of new stuff out there, and I’ve been playing with it, and I’m like, oh, okay, instead of a person asking you 1000 questions, now, a chat bot asked you 1000 questions, right? I don’t think asking you 1000 questions was a good idea in the first place, right? So I could use some time, yeah. So I don’t think a lot at the at the base of all of it, after doing. This work. I’m now in my 16th year of this company. A lot, not a lot has changed in what college essays are. Why we have students write them. What’s changed is the college landscape has changed. The world landscape has changed. Technology has changed, and that’s how the world works. It’s always been like that. Yeah,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  35:24

well, I love it. Thank you. We have busted a lot of bad advice and given some good advice. And I’m going to encourage our listeners to go back to our episode 66 actually, I just realized it was three years ago, not two years ago, that you were on, can you believe it, and go back to Episode 66 to get additional bad advice and good advice. And Susan, thank you so much. Thank you.

 

Susan Knoppow  35:51

My pleasure. Good to be here with you. Lisa,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  35:59

thank you for tuning in to this critical conversation with Susan, I hope you’ve gained clarity that will guide your team through the essay writing process while maintaining their authentic voice. Remember, college essays aren’t just about perfect grammar or polished writing. They’re an opportunity for your team to share their unique story and experiences with admissions officers, as Susan emphasized focus on authenticity rather than perfection. If you found this episode helpful, I’d love for you to share it with other parents of college bound teens who might be wrestling with these same issues and questions about AI. And before you go, you can access the valuable essay resources. Susan put together at flourish coaching co.com, forward slash essays. I’ve also listed it for you in the show notes. These tools will guide your team through the essay writing process, step by step, helping them showcase their genuine voice. Thank you again for listening to College and Career Clarity a flourish, coaching production. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins, and I’ll see you next time as we continue to help you and your team navigate the college bound journey with confidence. You.