Consider recording your ideas for application essays in a voice note. Then, upload the recording to AI and ask AI to transcribe what you wrote. This translates your ideas from your head to your computer in a clear and quick manner.
While AI can’t replace mentorship from professors and advisors, if you feel stuck as you’re drafting essays, you can use AI as a conversation partner to talk through ideas or challenges.
Use AI as a tool for proofreading application essays for grammar and word choice.
If you receive an interview, you can use AI to write practice interview questions.
Consider putting your resume, essays, and the description of the fellowship into AI and ask it to provide interview questions based on the information.
If you know who will be interviewing you, AI can design questions from those people’s perspectives. For example, tell AI: You are a Schwarzman Scholarship interviewer who is an expert in immigration law. You are interviewing a political science student. The Schwarzman Scholarship values academics, leadership, and character. Please provide interview questions about global international relations issues.
If your interview is in a language other than English, you can ask AI to generate interview questions in that language.
Guidance and Pitfalls to Consider
AI is a useful tool for working on fellowship applications, but one should also be aware of potential pitfalls such as plagiarism, inaccurate information and citations and the potential for reproducing biases.
Please also be aware of any guidelines that specific fellowships have about AI use. Some fellowships require that students do not use AI for any part of the application, while other fellowships are more open to AI use.
You will not win or be nominated for a competitive fellowship using AI alone to write your essays, simply because essays need to be more specific and personal than AI can craft.
Resources
We recommend that you log in to Copilot with your Ohio State credentials when using AI for fellowship applications and academic purposes. This will give you additional data security protections: your conversations will not be stored, and Microsoft cannot access your data (for example the fellowship materials you might upload to Copilot). Access Copilot and read more about Ohio State’s protections here.