Day: September 19, 2025

• OpenAI showcased how college students are using ChatGPT at school.
• The company revealed the top prompts it gathered after inviting 70 students out to its ChatGPT lab to share and refine prompts.
• AI remains a major topic of conversation in education.

What kind of prompts are college students plugging into ChatGPT these days? A new list of 100 AI prompts created by college students who collaborated through OpenAI’s remote lab offers a window into exactly that.

The prompts, which were shared and voted on by 70 college students, are organized into three categories — study, career, and life — and show the students asking ChatGPT to perform roles ranging from a study buddy to a career counselor or even a lawyer.

OpenAI said students from over 50 universities, including Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State, UCLA, BYU, and Washington University in St. Louis, participated in the weekly group discussions. The entire list of participants, who were selected through an application process, is available here.

Other times, the prompts are incredibly short and simple, such as asking for synonyms for “sophisticated.” They can also veer into more heady territory, such as when one student asked the chatbot to deduce their “true goals in life.”

Then, there’s the practical — such as asking ChatGPT to “pre-game the dining hall menu” and develop a meal plan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that’s healthy, high in protein, and includes fruits and vegetables.

“Earlier this year, we invited 70 students into the ChatGPT Lab to swap their best chats,” Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, wrote Wednesday on X. “Together they tested, refined, and voted on the most useful chats, and today we’re sharing their top 100 for students everywhere.”

Many of the prompts — you can see the entire list here — seem to fit within OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s goal of creating an AI that has a Ph. D.-level expertise that can be relied on to answer a variety of questions, though we would be curious what their professors would say about the results.

Here are a few of the prompts from each category that stood out. If you click through the prompt on the site, it opens up ChatGPT and plugs it in so you can try it out yourself.

Study prompts

Career prompts

Life prompts

As students use AI, educators adapt

The study prompts, in particular, demonstrate that students are increasingly looking to AI to help them save time in their studies.

While AI can be used to help students digest and understand information, college students who previously spoke to Business Insider voiced conflicting feelings about their use of the tech, with some worried about developing an overreliance.

As some colleges embrace the technology and create AI degrees, teachers are grappling with how to navigate a new learning landscape. Some are banning AI use in the classroom. Others say they’re relying more on in-person tests and handwritten papers that are harder to game with ChatGPT.

Classroom assignments are also evolving. Business Insider previously spoke with a lecturer whose college had developed an in-house system to detect how difficult it might be for someone to use AI to cheat on a specific assignment.

• The Yang Gang, tech bros, and two Business Insider reporters partied in Flatiron on Thursday night.
• We put our phones away for the first time in too long.
• The free, offline party inspired dance moves, a little flirting, and great pics.

Manhattan’s most analog party starts with a confiscation. At the door on Thursday night, I slipped my iPhone into a black pouch and clicked it shut. No excuses. Time to make eye contact.

I’m 35 and newly back in New York. My plus one, Amanda, is 24 and could sort the room in seconds: tech bros here, corporate girls there, the deadpan “Gen Z stare” everywhere.

We treated the no-phones Offline party like an anxiety-inducing field test. I brought millennial loneliness and a habit of hiding behind a screen. Amanda brought cheerleader confidence and a faster stride. We stepped onto a roof of strangers to see who could survive longer without a screen.

I found the Offline party through, of all places, host Andrew Yang’s Instagram. I’d been prepping to interview the former presidential candidate about Noble Mobile, his new cellphone plan that pays users back for the data they don’t use.

A few days earlier, he’d posted shots from the last Offline bash — sweaty crowds of tech bros dressed for a demo day and women dancing shoulder-to-shoulder. Later in the week, he shared a video of himself plopping down in a park. The words “touch grass” burst into frame.

Going offline is on brand for Yang. In his 2020 presidential run, he appealed to voters by warning of the ills of automation and the threat to jobs. His proposed solution: a universal basic income that gives every adult American $1,000 a month with no strings attached.

The Yang Gang eats it up. They’re a low-key yet dedicated group of younger, mostly male tech workers, many of whom joined the hive during his presidential campaign. In the years since, they’ve diligently followed and frequented his no-phone parties, which require an RSVP through the online invite app Posh.

Yang’s seventh Offline of the year drew 1,600 RSVPs for a Manhattan rooftop lounge that holds about 500, organizers said. Entry was free and first-come, first-served.

While phones were banned, cameras were not. And so, equipped with a good old-fashioned camera and with Amanda by my side, we stepped into the party. Here’s what it was like.

The first question we had going into Offline was: Who’s going to these parties?

Three minutes in, we had our answer. The Yang Gang.

These guys made a beeline for the merch table and picked up shirts to promote Yang’s cellphone plan.

We talked to a Harlem real-estate agent who worries about a tech-driven wipeout of entry-level jobs. He’s into UBI.

Early in the party, we saw Yang snake across the dance floor, shaking hands with people as he fled to the roof for air.

Behind a velvet rope, the star was a box of turf.

Partygoers lined up for their official “touch grass” portrait, laying tender hands on the sod, which was literally put on a pedestal.

Bartenders poured themed drinks like the Offline Mode with mezcal and banana liqueur.

“Touch Grass” and “End the Brain Rot” pulsed in projected letters, turning the walls into a “Black Mirror”-style PSA.

The venue — the popular club Somewhere Nowhere in Flatiron’s tech hub — was not the bumping, noisy lounge of Amanda’s nights past.

Downstairs, the vibe was nightclub-meets-WeWork happy hour, where the DJ frat-flicked to pop music. Message boards invited you to share favorite books and pickup lines.

The no-phone rule really did inspire connection. Without a screen to check every few minutes, we were forced to look up, which meant making eye contact, which meant having a conversation.

There was no dating app-inspired shyness in this room. Single men approached us openly. If you want to date a New York tech bro, Andrew Yang’s Offline parties are a swell place to start.

Upstairs, the vibe shifted dramatically. It was cooler, calmer, and reminded us of the backyard house parties we reveled in as teenagers.

Standing on top of the boarded-up pool — post-Labor Day in New York City, remember — we ran into a group of four 20-something women who’d just arrived.

Why did they come? They thought it looked cool on Instagram.

Do you have a story to share about tech parties or connecting offline? Contact these reporters at mrussell@businessinsider.com and ayen@businessinsider.com.

• Joseph Samuelson is the principal at Upton High School in Wyoming.
• The school uses a personalized learning model and doesn’t push college as the only goal.
• Samuelson said the structure empowers his students to excel in whichever path they choose.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Joseph Samuelson, the principal at Upton High School in Wyoming. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I would never want to go back to a traditional teaching model.

I remember going to a school board meeting about eight years ago, and the community was up in arms about Upton High School’s decision to switch to personalized learning. I was the local middle school’s social studies teacher at the time, and when the high school overhauled its learning model, mistakes were made. Parents weren’t given enough heads-up on what personalized learning meant, teachers didn’t have proper training, and it led to both staff and students leaving the school.

It took time to get over those initial humps, but I watched as teachers started to individualize their curriculum and shift away from what many parents thought personalized learning was: an online platform where kids learn from virtual programs, instead of teachers.

As more staff at the high school started to shift away from the standard lecture and grading system structure in favor of open periods where students — not teachers — could choose how they wanted to practice what they learned, I saw how students benefited from the personalized structure. They are more motivated and excited about their schoolwork and have developed personal agency through being able to direct their own educational paths.

I remember seeing that shift during one class. I was busy taking care of something else for the first 10 minutes, and I hadn’t addressed my students yet, but they all took the initiative to start working on their own projects. I started to see that learner agency and self-sufficiency kicked in, and I really liked that.

Our students have had to accept through this model that the only option they have is to learn, and while failing is okay, quitting is not. There’s no substitute for hard work, and we pride ourselves on instilling that work ethic in our students.

Beyond personalized learning, our high school doesn’t promote college as the main path students should take. Our vision is to prepare students for college, career, or the military — we don’t push any path over the other. Our only job is to ensure our students have the tools to excel in whichever path they choose, and we do all that we can to make that happen.

Getting rid of invisible walls that block students from their best path

I’ve seen firsthand how giving our students pathways to multiple routes — not just college — after graduation has changed their trajectories. I had one student who never liked school, and he didn’t excel in the traditional model. It got to a point where his parents weren’t sure he would even make it to graduation.

Our personalized structure completely changed the game for him. When he said that college wasn’t his goal and that he wanted to pursue his hunting passion, we worked to make that a reality. Our guidance counselor arranged a hunting guide apprenticeship for him, and we allowed him to take time off from school. We were able to turn things around for him, and a kid who wouldn’t even pick up a book at the start of his high school experience is now reading about agriculture and hunting for fun.

I stand firmly behind our personalized learning model, and I think it would benefit kids across the country. But everything is slower in the world of education, and change is hard. We’ve had representatives from other schools visit us, and many of them have said that they’re interested in switching over, but it’s too much work to implement in their own districts.

Students are also increasingly realizing that they don’t have to go to college to be successful. Before we switched to personalized learning, most kids would graduate from high school and go to the University of Wyoming — that was the default. But I would see some of those kids go to the university, skip class, and ultimately fail because college was never the right fit for them.

That’s starting to change. We’re seeing more kids pick two-year schools over the standard four-year college experience. At the same time, we want to make sure every student has the preparation for college if that’s their goal; about 40% of our students had a college credit last year, and I prefer to have students take their first college class with us so they are prepared to navigate tough professors, learn time management, and get college-level feedback.

We don’t let our students shut down when things get tough — we give them advice and the resources to help them persevere.