Using AI to Articulate Student Strengths

When I had my freshman students write a resume, I realized that the biggest challenge for students was articulating their strengths. We started with a professional summary and the majority of student summaries looked like:

My name is ___ and I am a freshman at ____ High School.

That was the essence of who they were as a student and as a professional. When we dove deeper and as I got to know my students more, I uncovered that not only did we have freshman at Magnolia High School, but we also had:

• Students with welding experience
• Athletes (baseball, basketball, football, soccer) ranging from our very own school teams to club sports
• Landscapers
• Construction workers after school and on the weekend
• Nail business owners with a strong social media presence
• Video editors

And seriously… so much more. Not only were these not articulated within my students resumes, but I realized that they struggled to see these as strengths and assets. They had trouble articulating who they were, their stories, and just how great they were.

As a result, we utilized AI (Bard AI and ChatGPT) to help students articulate their strengths.

Here’s a sample of a few student summaries:

There are some revisions that students need to make, such as checking for accuracy because ChatGPT and BardAI have inputted things that students have done based on the information that it’s collected on what they would have done in that role. In addition, having students paraphrase is an important step towards ensuring that they voice and ownership is fully from the student.

It gave my students a strong starting point by taking strengths and assets that they can’t see and allowing them to visualize how amazing they truly are. These come a long way from simply, “I’m a student at ___ high school,” and the biggest benefit of this all was seeing the smile of students faces when they realized that this summary is a true representation of the skills that they have.