How I got into the OpenAI Student Collective

I nearly made it sound like a résumé

I had all the usual material ready: projects, research, open-source work, and a sentence about being excited by AI. It was accurate. It was also forgettable.

The part I actually cared about was less flattering. I had gotten very good at using AI to move quickly, and then I caught myself struggling to explain decisions inside projects that looked finished. The code worked. The benchmark ran. But if somebody asked why I chose the baseline or what would make the result wrong, I sometimes had to go back and relearn my own work.

That bothered me more than a failed test.

The answer I kept coming back to

For one of the application videos, I was asked about an AI habit more students should know. I talked about using ChatGPT and Codex as a learning and review system, not as a shortcut.

When I am building an inference benchmark now, I ask the model to challenge the benchmark before I ask it to help with code. What is the bottleneck? Does this metric actually measure the claim? What test would fail if my idea were wrong? Then I make it ask me a teach-back question.

If I cannot answer without peeking, I am not done.

The best use of AI is not “do this for me.” It is “help me understand this deeply enough that I can do it myself.”

That line became the center of my application because it was already how I wanted to work. I did not have to invent a leadership philosophy for the form.

What I said I wanted to do at Rutgers

I did not want to run a broad event where everyone hears that AI is changing the world and then goes home. Students have heard that enough.

I wrote about smaller sessions where people leave with something they understand: a debugged script, a study workflow, a personal site, a data analysis, or a small app. The standard would be simple. Can you explain what changed? Why does it work? What would you try next?

The bigger issue underneath that idea was agency. AI can make a student feel capable, or it can quietly convince them that they cannot start without it. I have felt both sides. I wanted to make the first one easier to reach.

Then I got the email

I was selected as a Campus Lead in the OpenAI Student Collective. I am proud of it, but I also want to describe it correctly. This is a campus program role. It is not employment at OpenAI, and I am not going to dress it up as that.

I also cannot tell you the secret reason I was picked. I was not in the review room. What I can tell you is that the application became much better once I stopped trying to sound impressive and wrote about a problem I had actually experienced.

The role matters if I turn it into useful work at Rutgers. The title is the easy part.

What I would tell somebody applying

Do not start with the organization. Start with the thing you genuinely want to change. Then show where you have already tried to change it, even in a small way.

Also, keep a copy of every answer you submit. I kept the ideas, but not a perfect snapshot of the final form. Reconstructing it later was annoying and completely avoidable.

Most of all, write something you would still believe if the program name disappeared from the page. That is usually the part another person remembers.