Within weeks, my high school was buzzing about AI. Some of my fellow students in Mr. Brown’s AP Lit class used it to summarize Robert Frost poems, without bothering to read them. I remained torn. An extra hour to chill at home would’ve been nice, but Frost’s poetry wasn’t especially dense. Plus, Mr. Brown was my favorite teacher, and I felt he was owed the effort of doing the reading myself. We all got similar grades on the assignment, which annoyed me. But in our seminar conversation, I could tell I had a deeper understanding of Frost’s work.
In 2024, I got into my dream school, Duke. I couldn’t wait. I longed for the classic collegiate experience my parents described: staying up late discussing philosophy in dorm rooms, reading classic literature in mortared lecture halls, asking life’s biggest questions in the birthplace of scientific discoveries.
I quickly learned that at a school like Duke, efficiency matters as much as accomplishment. The faster you complete your coursework, the more time you can put into the extracurricular activities designed to give you an advantage when you enter the work world. Before classes even began, students were running around campus in suits, rushing pre-professional clubs with lower acceptance rates than Duke itself. Talk of summer internships sprouted around the 8-week mark. The question on everyone’s lips was how to get an A while spending as little time on their schoolwork as possible.