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AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brain With AI, Don’t Weaken it.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brainpower With AI, Don’t Weaken It.
~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

In a previous post, Afraid of Being Replaced by AI? we looked at research on the physical differences human brains have with AI neural networks. It revealed unique capabilities our brains have over AI.

My next post presented a cognitive training plan for mid-career professionals to use AI in ways that strengthen their irreplaceable human capabilities, not weaken them. In this post, we’ll look at ways students can use AI to strengthen their fight against AI for jobs.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brainpower With AI, Don’t Weaken it.

Reports indicate that AI is disrupting the entry-level job market for college students. With recent articles predicting a broken career ladder and some saying an AI job apocalypse may already be here. While much is out of your control, there are things you can do to prepare. It takes a growth mindset and thinking past today’s assignment and grade.

It’s no secret AI provides easy, tempting ways to complete assignments. But the way you learn matters as much as the degree you receive. Think past today and focus on what will be best at graduation.

We can only leverage the unique capabilities of our human brains if we use and train them. Your goal in college isn’t to get an A. It’s to build a mind that’s sharp, adaptable, and creative within a discipline.

If you let AI lift the “cognitive weights,” you won’t build brainpower. This doesn’t mean avoid AI altogether. A savvy student will use it as a personal trainer to push, challenge, and help them achieve new levels of expertise. Here’s how to use AI in ways that accentuate not replace your unique human skills.

1. Reading & Research: AI as Guide & Tutor

Cognitive Workout: The struggle of reading a dense, difficult text and connecting its ideas to what you already know. This builds the rich, “messy” web of knowledge that creates insight.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): “Summarize this 35-page chapter for me.” You get the facts but skip the workout of critical reading and synthesis.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Use AI as a Tour Guide (Before Reading): “I’m about to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. What are the 3-5 core concepts I should look for? Define terms like ‘invisible hand’ and ‘division of labor’ for me.”
  • Use AI as a Tutor (During Reading): When you hit a wall, don’t give up. Ask for help. “Can you explain this specific paragraph in simpler terms? I’m confused about the concept of ‘fiat currency’.”
  • Use AI as a Quizmaster (After Reading): To check your own understanding, prompt: “Ask me five challenging questions about free-market philosophy. Don’t give me the answers until I try first.”

Result: AI helps you prepare to navigate the difficult terrain of learning, but you’re still the one thinkingh. You build the mental muscle of critical reading and information synthesis essential for knowledge-based careers.

2. Lectures & Notetaking: AI as Study Partner

Cognitive Workout: The act of listening, filtering what’s important, and synthesizing it into your own handwritten notes. This hardwires concepts into your memory through embodied cognition.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): Using an AI generated transcript as a substitute for taking your own notes. You become a passive recorder, not an active learner.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Take Your Own Notes First: When you know AI’s not recording everything you’re more motivated to pay attention in the moment. The act of writing and drawing connections is core to learning.
  • Use AI to Enhance Your Notes: After class, use AI to improve what you’ve already created. “Here are my messy notes from the lecture. Can you help me organize them into a clean outline for a study guide?”
  • Use AI for Gap Analysis: “Here are the slides, lecture notes, study guide, and my notes. What key topics from the professor’s resources did I miss or cover sparingly?”

Result: You get the full cognitive benefit of live synthesis. Then, AI acts as a study partner, helping you organize, review, and spot weaknesses in your understanding. This can supplement a professor’s or TA’s office hours with a 24/7 tutor trained on your specific class.

3. Class Participation: AI as Private Debate Coach

Cognitive Workout: Articulating a half-formed idea, thinking on your feet, and responding to challenges from professors and peers. This builds mental agility, plus skills and practice in persuasive communication.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): Staying silent in class because you can ask AI for the “perfect” answer later, avoiding all risk.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Use AI as a Sparring Partner: Before class, prepare for the debate. “I want to argue that the movie The Wolf of Wall Street fails to capture the nuances of the main character’s motivations in Jordan Belfort’s memoir. Act as someone who disagrees to challenge my position with counterarguments.”
  • Use AI for Perspective-Taking: “I need to understand the ‘utilitarian’ ethical framework for my business ethics class. Explain it to me as a non-expert and then give a real-world scenario where it would conflict with ‘virtue ethics.'”

Result: You enter class discussion better prepared, more confident, and with a deeper understanding of multiple viewpoints. AI helps you build mental resilience to respond in unpredictable, live human debates. You build soft skills with your discipline’s hard skills.

4. Writing & Assignments: AI as A Sounding Board & Editor

Cognitive Workout: The struggle of starting with a blank page and building your own structured, logical, and original argument. This is a mental workout for causal and abstract reasoning skills.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): “Write an essay about the impact of social media on teenage mental health.” You get a paper, but don’t gain experience in learning how to think. It can also be academic dishonesty if you turn it in unchanged as your own work.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Use it as an Idea Generator: “I’m writing about the 2007-8 financial crisis. Suggest 10 non-obvious research questions I could explore beyond the typical narrative.”
  • Use it as an Outline Critic: After you create your own outline, ask for feedback. “Here’s my thesis and main points. Is it a logical flow? What’s the weakest argument?”
  • Use it as a “Rubber Duck“: When a paragraph feels clunky, paste it in and ask: “What am I trying to say here? Help me rephrase this for clarity.”
  • Use it as an Editor: After you’ve done the hard work, let it polish your creation. “Check this for grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, and inconsistent tone.” But don’t let AI replace your tone! Remember to maintain your unique voice.

Result: You maintain ownership of the core intellectual work: the research, the thinking, and the creation of the argument. AI serves as a collaborator that helps you brainstorm, test your logic, and polish your final product to make your own work even better.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brainpower With AI, Don’t Weaken It. A summary workout reminder on how to be more human as a student training for an AI saturated job market. Click on image to download a PDF.

With any AI use, keep in mind that you’re responsible for the final output. Fact-check all results. Even the best reasoning and deep research models hallucinate making up research, stats, and references. Also, check your university and professor’s AI use policies to avoid plagiarism. Follow university, professor and internship employer guidelines on data privacy and uploading copyrighted, sensitive, or proprietary material.

These are just a couple examples for these use cases. Review the AI Prompt Framework for more guidance on how to craft prompts that perform well. For more details on how AI can help or harm your learning, see the post and infographic that shows how AI Can Skip the Stages of the Cognitive Learning Process. See this post for a look at How AI Agents May Impact Marketing Jobs and this post for how you can prepare with AI Vibe Marketing.

This Was 75% Human Generated Content! 

The initial ideas were my own, so were beginning parts of a rough draft. I used Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking for my research. I got better results when I asked the model to respond to my prompt again after running 10 miles. Thanks to Christopher Penn for his “Add a Banana” AI principle. That’s what helped send me in this training your brain direction which draws from my personal experience training for marathons. I added my own support articles, perspective on examples, and wrote in my own voice. Gemini 2.0 Flash generated the brain lifting weights graphic.

AI for Professionals: Deepen Your Expertise With AI, Don’t Outsource It.

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

In my last post, Afraid of Being Replaced by AI? we looked at the physical differences between human brains and AI neural networks. We discovered unique capabilities our brains have over AI. Yet, in the fight with AI for jobs, we can only leverage those unique brain capabilities if we use them.

AI Training for Knowledge Workers: A Guide to Augment Your Intelligence, Not Replace It.
Image created with Gemini 2.0 Flash Image generator https://aistudio.google.com

Use AI for everything, and you could lose your human brain advantage. Working your brain in specific ways, like physical training, is essential to maintain and develop function.

The goal is not to avoid AI. News continues to reveal more tasks being outsourced to AI. In a recent interview, CEO Marc Benioff claims AI can do 30%-50% of work tasks at Salesforce.

The goal is to remain valuable in your job by building up your irreplaceable human skills. Some companies like Bank of New York Mellon are already utilizing digital employees working alongside human counterparts for coding and validating payment instructions.

To build up your human cognitive abilities, don’t approach AI as a replacement for thinking, but as a powerful research assistant, data analyst, and co-thinker. Let AI do the mechanical so you can do the strategic.

It’s tempting to let AI do it all. But your brain will get less fit and you’re basically telling your employer they don’t need you. Instead, use AI in ways to build up your brain in areas that accentuate your value.

Instead of training AI to replace you, use it to help you be irreplaceable. Treat AI as a cognitive sparring partner to strengthen your innate human abilities.

To get started, here are some workouts to train your brain in ways that make your humanity more valuable.

1. Engage with Primary Sources; Use AI as a Research Magnifier

Cognitive Workout: Finding a single “aha!” moment in a sea of raw data, customer reviews, or project reports. This requires synthesis and insight.

AI Trap (AI Replaces): “Summarize these 1,000 customer reviews for me.” You get the conclusion without the context and miss the surprising, outlier details where real opportunity lies.

Human Value (AI Augments): You use AI as a powerful lens to navigate the source material yourself. How? See AI prompt examples below.

  • Prompt: “Analyze these 1,000 reviews and cluster them into the top five recurring themes. Then show three verbatim examples of each.”
  • Prompt: “Search this entire project file and identify all mentions of ‘risk’ or ‘delay’. Then show the full paragraphs where each mention appears.”
  • Prompt: “In this sales data, highlight anomalies that deviate more than 20% from the quarterly average.”

Result: AI does arduous tasks of searching and sorting – low-cognitive-load work. You reserve your brain’s energy for high-value human tasks: looking at the organized raw material and asking, “Why is this happening? What’s the hidden story here?” You’re the detective. AI gave you an organized case file.

2. Strategic Note-Taking: Use AI as a Post-Meeting Debriefer

Cognitive Workout: Actively listening and synthesizing a live conversation into key themes and action items.

AI Trap (AI Replaces): Using an automated AI transcript as a substitute for paying attention in a meeting.

Human Value (AI Augments): You still take strategic, handwritten notes during the meeting forcing you to listen and filter in real time. After, leverage AI for insightful follow-up. How? Here’s some AI prompt examples.

  • Prompt: “Here’s the meeting transcript, and here’s my personal notes. Synthesize both into a draft email including key decisions, assigned action items, and owners.”
  • Prompt: “Based on this transcript, what were the main points of disagreement? What topic had the most energy behind it?”
  • Prompt: “Based on the meeting transcript, my personal notes, main points of disagreement, and most energetic topics, what top three changes should I prioritize in this marketing plan?”

Result: You get the full cognitive benefit of live synthesis, ensuring you understand the meeting’s flow and dynamics. Then, you use AI to save time on the administrative task of writing a perfect summary, freeing you to think about the next strategic move.

3. Driving the Discussion: Use AI as a Private Sparring Partner

Cognitive Workout: Thinking on your feet, articulating a persuasive argument, and navigating complex social dynamics while engaged in a live setting.

AI Trap (AI Replaces): Staying silent and asking the AI for the “right answer” later.

Human Value (AI Augments): You use AI to prepare for and learn from the human interaction. You use it as a private trainer. How? Below are some AI prompt examples.

  • Pre-Meeting Prompt: “I’m about to propose _______. Act as a skeptical CFO and give me the three toughest questions you’d ask about my plan.”
  • Pre-Meeting Prompt: “Help me rephrase my main point for an audience of engineers versus an audience of marketers.”
  • Post-Meeting Prompt: “I felt some resistance when I presented my idea. Based on what I’ve told you, what are some likely underlying concerns I didn’t address?”

Result: AI helps you anticipate challenges, refine thinking, and build empathy for other perspectives. This makes your live in-person contribution more insightful, persuasive, and resilient amplifying human social intelligence.

4. Authoring Your Own Strategy: Use AI as a Creative Sounding Board

Cognitive Workout: The “blank page” struggle of structuring a novel argument, building a logical narrative, and creating a clear vision from scratch. This is where true ownership and deep understanding are born.

AI Trap (AI Replaces): “Write a three-year strategic plan for my division.” You get a generic, soulless document you can’t truly defend because you didn’t build it.

Human Value (AI Augments): You do the hard work of core ideation first. Then you bring in AI as a collaborator to refine and challenge your thinking. How? See these AI prompt examples.

  • Prompt (After you’ve outlined): “Here is my core thesis and my three supporting pillars. What is the weakest part of this argument? What have I overlooked?”
  • Prompt (After you’ve written a draft): “My goal is to inspire my team. Analyze the tone of this draft and suggest ways to make it more compelling and visionary.”
  • Prompt (For creativity): “Give me an analogy from biology or history that could help explain this complex business concept to my client.”

Result: You maintain full ownership of the core strategy and logic. AI acts as a 24/7 editor, critic, and muse to help test and polish your human-generated idea into the best version.

A summary workout reminder on how to be more human in your job to compete in an AI job market. Click on image to download a PDF.

With any AI use, remember that you’re responsible for the final output. Fact-check AI outputs, avoid plagiarism, and maintain your unique voice. This is where human discipline expertise can shine – not taking everything AI confidently says at face value.

Also, know your company and client AI use policies. Be mindful of uploading copyrighted, sensitive, or proprietary material into LLMs.

For more ideas on how AI can be a cognitive sparring partner to improve your ideas, see my post Why AI Flattery Fails. For a look at how AI can help you iterate ideas for faster innovation, see my post on AI Vibe Marketing.

You, the human, must always be the one asking “why” and setting the intent. Use AI for the “what” and “how”—let it search, sort, draft, and critique. This allows you more time and energy to deep, creative, and strategic thinking that machines cannot replace, making you more valuable, less replaceable.

In my next post, I’ll provide a similar cognitive training plan for students. How can you begin using AI in these ways for your job today?

This Was 75% Human Generated Content! 

The initial ideas were my own, and so were the beginning parts of a rough draft. I used Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking for my research. I got better results when I asked the model to respond to my prompt again after running 10 miles. Thanks to Christopher Penn for his “Add a Banana” AI principle. That’s what helped send me in this training your brain direction. I added my own support articles and perspective on examples. I used Gemini 2.0 Flash to generate the graphic.