We-Ha.com will be publishing a series of essays/blogs/reflections on the issue of going to college – primarily a set of thoughts and musings, along with some practical advice, intended to support students and parents as they embark on this journey. While many of our readers are experts in this topic, many others are less knowledgeable and have little outside support. We hope this is helpful to all readers as they go through the various stages of getting into and getting something out of college.

By Adrienne Leinwand Maslin

For those of us tired of hearing about AI this and AI that, I’m sorry. I believe we will have to endure for a long time to come.

AI is just getting started. Opinions on its use are forming, evolving, changing, and scaring us half to death. I have always come down squarely on the “hate” side of the love-hate equation regarding AI although certainly aware of AI’s many positive uses. Lately, however, I’ve started to feel a wee bit of the love. And I don’t know how to feel about that; there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance going on in my head!

I recently asked AI to draft an email. I wanted to see what AI could do for me as I try to market my graphic novels for kids. I am not good at marketing and my thinking was that AI could only help. And as it turns out, it did! A lot! Using Perplexity, a privately-owned AI company, I received a well-written draft that was grammatically correct and stylistically appropriate for my purposes. I added a bit here and deleted a bit there, changed this a bit, eliminated that, and sent it off.

Here, in more detail, is what AI did for me:

1. It drafted an email that I had been dragging my heels on. I had recently returned from a cruise and I was still clinging to the cruising lifestyle which involved touring, fun, and a good deal of food but definitely did not include work. I was having a difficult time motivating myself to buckle down and embark on some much-needed marketing initiatives. With little interest in using my brain, I asked AI to do some of the work for me. And it gave me the start I needed!
2. Perplexity, which I’ve started to refer to with great fondness as “Lexity,” included some information in the draft email – that even kids who don’t like to read frequently finish my books from cover to cover without stopping – that I had never thought to include in previous marketing emails, even though neighborhood parents had reported to me that this does, in fact, apply to my books. That was very useful and I will probably include something similar in any subsequent marketing efforts.
3. It used a writing style that did not sound exactly like mine but that was quite good. It was a little more relaxed in places and I decided that was a good thing. For the most part I went with it. Maybe Perplexity knows something about my audience that I don’t and I will benefit from this change in writing style.
4. It generated a list of recipients with their contact information without my having to look up each one individually. Not bad for 30 seconds of “thinking” on its part.
5. It saved me a considerable amount of time.

Without trying to pat myself on the back, I approached my use of AI in a very deliberate and considered manner. I thought about my audience and determined that my readers would be a more casual group of people who would be more interested in the content of my message but not be particularly interested in whether I had used AI. I considered the degree to which I copied and pasted directly from Lexity’s output – perhaps about 40%. I decided that in this particular situation the change in writing style produced by Lexity might be to my benefit and was worth incorporating. There is nothing I did that was without a great deal of thought and reflection.

For a while now I have been thinking there should be a ban on AI until the age of 25 when, for the most part, a young person’s brain is fully formed. And in a July 27, 2026 guest essay in The New York Times by Debbie Millman, chair of the master’s program in branding at the School of Visual Arts, I learned that Ms. Millman agrees! In fact, Millman is holding out for age 40!

“We have been so quick to treat access to new technology as an inevitability that we have failed to question whether every powerful tool should be placed in the hands of every developing mind the moment it becomes available.”

She goes on to say, “There is something druglike about using AI not because it produces pleasure but because it removes a particular kind of pain. A person who grows up with AI may never know the necessary agony of a blank page, the false start, the dull vocabulary and the private embarrassment of a first draft. A student who relies on AI too early will most likely never sit long enough with confusion to distinguish it from failure. Confusion is a necessary state wherein people learn how to think for themselves. … Language is not merely how we express ourselves; it is one of the ways we become ourselves. We write in order to find out what we think, we revise in order to discover whether or not we believe it, and we speak, stumble, clarify, retract and try again and again in order to understand the space between ideas and truth.”

How I wish I had come up with that myself! It is beautifully stated and expresses my views completely. Writing is foundational to thinking. Brett Stephens, a columnist for the New York Times expressed it this way in an Aug. 5, 2026 opinion piece: “What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate – and accountable. People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered.

And in yet another New York Times article (Aug. 17, 2026), this one by Dana Goldstein, she says, “Research shows that traditional, unassisted composition is valuable, not despite its difficulty, but because of it. Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition – the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.

So what does this have to do with writing a college admissions essay? Everything! As you think about what to write in that very critical document that may help you get into the school of your dreams, you will first have to research how different colleges’ AI policies apply to your college application.

I asked my new friend Lexity to generate a list of popular, selective colleges and each one’s AI policy for applicants. I am not including the list with this article because I am not sure if it is 100% accurate. Information using the same prompt provided by ChatGPT gave me a slightly different response.

If you do your own research you will probably discover that each college has it’s own rules for how applicants may use AI in the application process but that, in general, the use of AI is either strongly discouraged, prohibited with some exceptions, or prohibited completely. Further, AI is still in its infancy and, therefore, so are college policies. College policies are evolving so it is best to check the current policies of the individual colleges you are applying to.

My advice to you is to stay clear of AI in all aspects of your application. Some colleges will allow you to use it to brainstorm ideas for your essay. My advice is not to use AI in this way. As Debbie Millman, Brett Stephens, and Dana Goldstein explain, the struggle of thinking and ultimately identifying a topic is worth it and it assures that your voice will come through. That is what colleges want to read in your essay – your authentic voice.

I like the advice given by the University of Pennsylvania, which I first read about in the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian and which I subsequently found directly on Penn’s admissions website: “Here’s a simple test: if you couldn’t explain, in an interview or conversation, how you arrived at what you wrote, or speak to it in your own words, it isn’t ready to submit.”

I had another recent experience with AI. In mid-August, I had to put my 13-year-old dog, Roxanne, to sleep. I had taken her to see our vet several times but in between those visits I had been researching her symptoms and learning about end of life care for dogs online. Google asked me if I would like more specific information by typing questions or information about my dog in their “Ask Anything” box.

The Google AI assistant then engaged me in a back-and-forth consisting of information and questions which continued for about three or four exchanges. That is, until I stopped to question whether I was really having an intelligent conversation with a chatbot. It sure didn’t feel that way. This “thing” was engaging, it was conversant, it was friendly. It made me feel that my questions were important. It showed me compassion which I needed during that time. I never felt that 30 million other people were asking the Google AI assistant vastly different questions at that very same moment. There was no divided attention on its part. As far as I knew, it was responding to me and me alone! It was like staring into Roxanne’s big, beautiful, brown eyes with her cute little eyelashes and she staring back with so much love, just for me.

Please remember as you write your college essays or rely on AI for other things – especially friendship: AI is not human. AI cannot think. Even AI will tell you this. This is what Google AI had to say when I entered the prompt “Can AI think for itself?”

No, artificial intelligence does not think for itself. AI does not have a mind, feelings, or self-awareness. It works by using math and computer programs to find patterns in huge amounts of data and guess the next best word or action. When it answers you, it is matching patterns, not understanding ideas.

Why AI cannot think:

• No inner life: AI has no feelings, happiness, sadness, or pain.
• No free will: AI cannot choose to do something on its own. It only works when a human or a program gives it a prompt or input.
• No true understanding: AI rearranges symbols and words based on statistics. It does not know the true meaning behind the text it creates.

Why it might seem like AI thinks:

• Good at tricks: AI can write essays, play games, and talk like a person. This creates the illusion that a real mind is inside.
• Copying humans: AI models are trained on human writing. They mimic how humans talk, so they sound smart and aware.

When you use AI you have to remember what it is and how it got to be that way. You have to remember that it doesn’t feel, it doesn’t understand, and it doesn’t understand YOU. It only spits out what 50 million other people have said they do or would like to do in any given situation and applies it to you.

But you are unique. Your college essay is unique. Only you can write a college essay that reflects who you are. Only you can choose a topic that is meaningful to you. AI does not know you best. If you need help brainstorming, do it with the human beings in your life. Parents, grandparents, siblings, or teachers – they know you best. Do not use AI for your college application essays! Stay away from AI until you’re 25! Better yet, 40!

Adrienne Leinwand Maslin recently retired from a 45-year career in higher education administration. She has worked at public and private institutions, urban and rural, large and small, and two-year and four-year, and is Dean Emerita at CT State-Middlesex. She has held positions in admissions, affirmative action, president’s office, human resources, academic affairs, and student affairs. Adrienne has a BA from the University of Vermont, an MEd from Boston University, and a PhD from the University of Oregon. She is presently writing a series of graphic novels on life skills and social issues for 8-12 year olds believing that the more familiar youngsters are with important social issues the easier their transition to college and adulthood will be. Information about this series as well as contact information can be found at www.adrienneleinwandmaslin.com.

Like what you see here? Click here to subscribe to We-Ha’s newsletter so you’ll always be in the know about what’s happening in West Hartford! Click the blue button below to become a supporter of We-Ha.com and our efforts to continue producing quality journalism.