The OSU AI Career Assistant was developed by student workers and trained on OSU-specific resources
Student workers at Oregon State’s Career Development Center have a new tool to use during career advising appointments. It’s a custom AI chat, trained on OSU’s own career resources, that they actively participated in developing.
Launched this spring, the OSU AI Career Assistant is a custom AI tool based on Open AI’s ChatGPT platform. It’s designed to aid the Career Development Center’s team of student career assistants (CAs). CAs advise their classmates on all things career-related, helping fellow Beavs with resumes, cover letters, interview preparation, and other questions related to exploring careers and securing jobs and internships.
“It’s a really cool tool that is used to supplement what we’re already doing, and just make sure that we’re providing students with the best resources and support that we can,” said Emma Partridge, a public health major who is one of five OSU career assistants currently trained to use the AI tool.
Michal Kawka, Director of Career Education for Oregon State, said he was inspired to create the OSU AI Career Assistant because he was curious about the possibilities it offered.
“One of the new things in AI in the last year has been the ability to create custom chats, right? These don’t just rely on generic technology. We can customize them content-wise and behavior-wise to a specific use case,” he said. “So that’s when we thought, okay. How about if we try to add ChatGPT as a tool for peer advising appointments, where it does not replace a human interaction, but augments that interaction?”
How might it augment the interaction? Very often, just by listening.
During a career advising appointment, and only with student permission, a CA can activate a dictation function in a regular Microsoft Word document. As the CA inquires about the student’s career goals and provides guidance, a transcript is generated. The CA can then provide the transcript to the OSU AI Career Assistant and prompt it for additional insights based on what it heard.
“Honestly, I was kind of amazed the first time that I used it,” said Maggie Willard, a CA who participated in a practice session with Kawka as part of her training.
During the practice appointment, Kawka interviewed Willard about her work and academic experiences, and together they brainstormed ways she could improve her resume. Then, they shared their transcript with the OSU AI Career Assistant and asked it for some ideas.
“It picked up on this very specific project I had talked about, and then Michal and I took that suggestion and refined it from there for my resume,” she said. “It took a whole conversation that we had, and it just completely picked out the bits and pieces that were important and kind of morphed it into what I could use. I felt like it helped pull everything together and put the bow on top of it, out of the conversation that we were already having.”
CA Emma Partridge is excited to take her experience developing and using the custom AI tool with her to future job opportunities.
In another appointment, Kawka and a CA worked with a student who was preparing to interview for a specific job. They used the OSU AI Career Assistant for help in several ways:
- They asked the OSU AI Career Assistant to generate sample interview questions based on the student’s photo of the job description.
- They practiced interviewing, provided the AI assistant with a transcript of their practice session, and asked it for feedback based on its knowledge of interview best practices.
- At the end of the appointment, they prompted the tool to generate an interview practice guide based on the core topics discussed during the appointment, then emailed the student with customized career recommendations.
The fact that OSU AI Career Assistant is typically working with completely original content – transcripts of advising appointments, generated in the moment, rather than generic material from online sources – is part of what makes it unique, Kawka said.
“Here, the base material for what AI is generating for us is really our conversation,” he said. “It’s content that we generate together, that we then ask AI to reflect on. It’s always very authentic material.”
Another thing that makes the AI Career Assistant unique? Its knowledge base. Kawka and the CAs trained the tool on specific data sets: the Oregon State Career Guide, the Career Development Center website, information from trusted industry associations, and government labor statistics.
“When you look at the generic ChatGPT and our ChatGPT, if you use both and ask the same question, one will give you an answer based on everything that’s out there on the Internet. Ours will give you answers that are OSU-specific, with the general Internet being a background for some of that information,” Kawka said.
Kawka drew on his background in software development to lead the CAs through an extensive testing process to refine the tool before using it in student appointments. The CAs asked multiple different types of prompts, recording and rating its responses each time. The goal, Kawka said, was to find the tool’s boundary conditions and improve both its tone and its performance. They also considered privacy and data security concerns, formulating procedures for gathering student consent and ensuring that no personally identifying information is fed into the tool.
Partridge, one of the trained CAs, says she thinks the experience working with the OSU AI Career Assistant will benefit her in the future.
“Because AI is on such a rise, it’s cool to have an opportunity where you can interact with it in a way, and then also be able to bring that to future jobs and say, ‘This is something that I am trained in, that I have some experience with,’” she said.
That’s exactly what Kawka has been hoping for – that the OSU AI Career Assistant will be an asset to his team of student workers, not a replacement for them.
“The interaction, the connection between students working together to learn more about careers, that’s still the core of it,” he said. “The AI is a supplemental layer of intelligence that helps us see what’s being said and what’s being discussed in a more holistic way.”
Will every appointment at the Career Development Center include AI now? Not necessarily. Kawka said the CAs can use their discretion to bring the OSU AI Career Assistant in when they need an additional perspective.
“I don’t think I would have to use it for every single typical appointment,” Willard said. Many students, she said, simply need help making minor formatting edits to improve their resume.
“I likely will not be using it just to edit someone’s resume. It’s going to be for stuff like generating interview questions for a specific major, or someone coming in and maybe not even having a resume. Then we can have that conversation and get some good insight from the AI there,” she said.
Learn more
Learn more about the Career Development Center or make an appointment with a career assistant.