AI Fundamentals: A Beginner’s Guide to Enhancing College Admissions

AI Fundamentals A Beginner’s Guide to Enhancing College Admissions

Ben Neely, Revolution Prep

AI Fundamentals

Getting Started In this guide: Choosing Your Tools and Signing Up Configuring Your AI Platform for Privacy and Efficiency Basics of AI Prompting

Choose Your Tools, Get Signed Up Paid vs. Free?

Your first decision is whether to pay for a recurring membership to an AI model, or to use the free version. All platforms offer a paid account for roughly $20/month. Obviously, saving money is great, but there are some important reasons to consider paying for the platform: Data Privacy Settings: For most AI models, you’ll have the ability to turn on a setting that prevents your data from being used by the AI provider – but this is only available with a paid subscription.

Access to the Newest and Most Powerful Models: In many cases, the free account will only give you access to the “second best” AI model that a provider offers, and you’ll need to pay to get access to the latest and greatest.

Usage Limits: On all platforms, free accounts are given a relatively limited amount of daily usage before they’ll shut you down. Paid accounts don’t grant unlimited usage, but for almost all standard use cases you won’t hit any limits on a paid plan.

AI Fundamentals

Which Tool To Choose?

As of this guide’s writing (August 2024), there are three “frontier models” available for consumer use – that is, the most powerful and cutting-edge AI platforms. Ultimately, for college counseling use cases, all three can handle most needs, but there are a few key differences.

The table below illustrates what each of these three models can and can’t do:

Image Generation

Can Access Internet

Notable Feature

Open AI’s ChatGPT-4o

Yes

Yes

Create and share “Custom GPTs”

Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet

No

No

Can build interactive experiences called “Artifacts”

Google’s Gemini Advanced/1.5 Pro

Yes

Yes

Can handle massive input files (up to ~2,000 pages of text)

So Which Should I Use? And How Do I Sign Up? You can certainly take the time to try the free versions of each- and all of them will work great for college counseling- but as of the writing of this guide (August 2024), we believe the best and easiest all-around AI model to use is: ChatGPT-4o

To sign up, just navigate to these links for each platform: ChatGPT: https://platform.openai.com/signup/ Claude: https://claude.ai/ Gemini: Gemini: https://gemini.google/advanced/

AI Fundamentals

Configuring Your AI Platform Data Privacy and Retention As we’re discussing the use of AI models for work that concerns students and their families, it’s important to be cognizant of how these companies use and retain any data that you provide them.

For ChatGPT in particular, here’s what you’ll want to do to ensure that any data you upload will not be used for training the company’s AI models: Go to your “Settings page”.

Find the option that says: Improve the model for everyone.

Make sure this is set to “off”.

Another step you can consider taking is to turn off ChatGPT’s “memory” – here’s how: Go to your “Settings page”.

Go to “Personalization”, then select “Memory”.

Set Memory to “off”. ***It’s worth noting that the tool’s ability to adapt to your needs improves when you turn this on, so you’ll need to weigh that decision individually.

Basics of AI Prompting At this point, you’re ready to dive in to using the AI tool. You can use our broader guide to AI prompting to get some good starting points, and some considerations for crafting your own prompts, but here are some core tips: Be explicit, like you’re giving instructions to a young student. These AI models cannot reason or understand ‘common sense’ things that may be obvious to humans, so you really do need to spell out exactly what you’re looking for in painful detail.

Feed it background information. In all the AI platforms, you can upload documents, audio files, data files, and ask the tool to utilize that information to come up with its answer.

Iterate, iterate, iterate, then save. Expect that you won’t necessarily get exactly the response you’re looking for with your first draft prompt. You’ll need to refine it and tweak it until you get your desired output, then make sure to save that prompt in your own files for future use.