By Arden Berry | Staff Writer
To increase efficiency and help students succeed, the Career Center has created artificial intelligence programs through Microsoft Copilot.
Career Center Director Amy Rylander said the program began over the summer with teams creating user guides that described how students could ethically use AI while applying for jobs.
“We started learning about prompting AI to do things, and as we began writing the guides and began putting updates in them and editing them to be in a certain way, our data person took our guides and fed them into Copilot, and we created agents,” Rylander said. “So instead of just a user’s guide, we now have agents to help students right now with three areas.”
Rylander said these three areas were resume-building, interviewing and career discovery. She also said the Career Center sent out an email last week linking the Copilot Agents for these three areas.
“Agents use AI to perform tasks by reasoning, planning and learning — using provided information to execute actions and achieve predetermined goals for the user,” the email read.
To use these Copilot Agents, Rylander said students should log in to Microsoft Office with their Baylor email, then use the provided Copilot Agent links and follow the provided prompts. For example, the Career Discovery Agent would provide a prompt to give the agent, then would ask a set of questions and suggest potential career paths.
“It’ll help you take the skills that you’re learning in your major and the skills that you’ve learned along the way and tell you some things that might work for you, and then that’ll help with the search on what you might want to look for,” Rylander said.
Career Center Assistant Vice Provost Michael Estepp said creating AI systems was a “proactive decision.”
“We’re always saying, ‘What are the things that students are looking for and need, and what can our staff do to make that happen?’” Estepp said. “Do we go AI or not? We definitely needed to, just so we were ahead of the game.”
Estepp said the AI systems would not replace the Career Center but would increase its efficiency, allowing the Career Center more time to help students in a more specialized way.
“Students want to come in, and they don’t want to meet with us 27 times,” Estepp said. “We can actually even dive deeper into the relationships because, hopefully, we can help more students, because our goal is to help 100% of students, so I think that’s one of the biggest pieces.”
However, Rylander said students should remember to use AI only as a tool, not as a replacement for their own experience.
“Use it ethically. AI does not take the place of your voice,” Rylander said. “It might spit out a bullet that says something, and I’ll say, ‘What did you mean by that?’ and get the whole story, because we want to make sure you don’t lose your voice and that you are not presenting yourself as something that you’re not.”
For the future, Rylander said the Career Center is currently working on Graduate School Planning and Career Communications Copilots. Estepp also said Baylor has a contract with LinkedIn that will help students learn to use AI for their careers.
“AI has impacted the job market so significantly that students have to have that. It’s a mandatory skill now,” Estepp said. “We’re going to start messaging out to students different certifications they can take within LinkedIn, that they can complete videos and short quizzes, and then actually be able to get certifications in different AI and large language model aspects and then put that on their resume.”
