Using AI the right way

A helper and a proofreader, never the writer. Part of Money and jobs, for graduate school and law school.

Queens Hall on the Queens College campus

AI is a good helper in a job search: it can sharpen your profiles, find openings, check your grammar and quiz you before an interview. It is a bad ghostwriter. Readers notice AI-written applications, and some programs disqualify them.

Where it helps

Your LinkedIn and Handshake profiles. Paste in your headline and About section and ask what is vague or missing, then fix it in your own words. LinkedIn's built-in writing help needs Premium; Microsoft's free module shows how to do it with Copilot. Handshake has its own AI features, and a complete profile shows up in more employer searches.
Finding jobs. Describe the job you want in plain words in Handshake or LinkedIn's AI job search, and ask AI which job titles to search for.
Proofreading. Give it your draft and ask it to point out grammar mistakes, unclear sentences and weak verbs, not to rewrite it. Harvard's career office shows how.
Fixing your résumé. Paste a job posting and your résumé and ask which skills the posting wants that you haven't shown, then add only what's true. Video: Tailor your résumé using Gemini (Google, 5 minutes).
Practicing interviews. Ask it to play the interviewer, one question at a time, and to give feedback on each answer. Videos: Practice interviewing with Gemini Live (Google, 3 minutes) and Prepare for a job interview with AI (UNLV Career Services, 12 minutes). Free practice tools: Interviews by AI (3 questions a month) and Yoodli (5 practice rounds). For a real person, book a mock interview at the career center.

Not sure what you want to do?

Tell it who you are and what you like, and it can point you to jobs you haven't heard of. Then check what it says against real sources, like O*NET, the career center and people who do the job. Columbia's career center has more ideas.

Prompts to try

I'm a [year] political science major at Queens College in New York. I like [classes or topics], I'm good at [skills], and I care about [issues]. I don't know what job I want. Suggest 10 entry-level job titles that fit me, what each one does day to day, and what I'd need to get hired.

For [job title], what does a normal day look like, what do people like and dislike about it, and what could I do this semester to find out if it's for me?

Here is a job posting: [paste]. Here is my experience: [paste]. What am I missing, and how could I build it in the next six months?

Act as an interviewer for [job] at [organization]. Ask me one question at a time, wait for my answer, then tell me what was strong and what to improve.

Don't let it write for you.

In a Robert Half survey (March 2026), 67% of HR leaders said AI-generated applications were slowing hiring. Some applications say it outright: the Commonpoint Data & Insights Fellowship asks for answers in your own words and may disqualify ones that look AI-generated, and 45% of the law schools in a Kaplan survey ban using AI to write the admissions essay. Skip tools that feed you answers during a real interview; employers prohibit them.

Use Copilot Chat with your CUNY Login: CUNY licenses it for students, and your chats aren't used to train Microsoft's models. They aren't private from CUNY's IT staff (Microsoft), so don't paste in anything sensitive.