A Letter to the Next Person Who Sits in My Seat

To whoever takes this course next,

I walked into this course thinking it was going to be an easy Global Studies course. I walked out with one TikTok video at 960k views and counting, a completely different relationship with AI, and a few things about myself I genuinely did not know before. Here is what actually happened.

The moments that changed something

About myself: The Tahrir trip is where it started. We were meeting students who came to Egypt just to learn Arabic, and I remember feeling this sense of pride, like wow, someone actually wants to learn my language. Then I tried to speak to them in Arabic and I could not get through a single sentence without throwing in English words. I have spoken Arabic my entire life. I grew up with it. And I had never once noticed that I could not speak it cleanly on its own. That bothered me. So I started practicing, one minute, one topic, fully in Arabic with zero English. I posted videos just to see what would happen. Second video hit 960k views now. I went from 300 followers to 3,200 in less than a month. That one trip did not just teach me something about culture. It showed me a gap in myself I had never seen before, and that turned into something I did not expect.

For my academic life: The AI literacies module changed how I actually use AI day to day. The big idea was the difference between prompting and dialogue, and once I understood it I could not unsee it. A single prompt and a polished output is not how to actually learn or communicate. The real learning happens when you stay in the conversation, push back, catch where the AI is wrong, and force it to be clearer. I stopped using AI like a vending machine after this module.

For my social life: Soliya was the only time this semester where I was the only guy in the room. At some point the conversation went toward wellbeing and mental health, and I said what I actually thought: that men's mental health gets ignored and it matters. I said it expecting it to be awkward. It was not. Everyone agreed immediately. That moment stayed with me because I almost did not say it. The format of Soliya, no raised hands, no waiting for your turn, just jumping in, was something I had to get used to. By the end it felt more natural than the way I normally communicate. I use that now.

For my career: The AI in Your Profession assignment was the one that surprised me the most. My whole assumption going in was that AI barely touches construction engineering because we are an on-site, physical industry. Both people I interviewed proved me completely wrong. Dr. Mohamed Abdallah was using ML for water demand forecasting and environmental monitoring. My former TA Eng. Bassel Harby had built SetoutAI, a tool that takes a set of land plots and automatically figures out which ones give you the highest return and what to build on them. I did not know any of this existed. The gap between what AI can do in my field and what is actually being used right now is massive. This is where I want to be, and I am seriously thinking about whether there is a startup in there somewhere after I graduate.

Not the three things I spent the most time on. The three that actually meant something.

Honest feedback for the course

In one sentence

Take this course if you think you already understand technology and you want to find out you do not.

What I used, what I would keep — tap each card to expand

Soliya, Tahrir, Equity Unbound

Soliya was genuinely one of the best experiences I have had at AUC. Talking to people from completely different countries about immigration, mental health, and how we see the world was something I did not expect would benefit me. No class has ever made me communicate like that. What would have made it better: start it earlier and cut the session length. Two hours is too much. The energy drops and everyone knows it.

The Equity Unbound session on how faculty should be using AI was something I had never even thought about before walking in. I always thought about AI responsibility from the student side. Sitting in a breakout room and working through the same scenario with people from different roles showed me how differently people think about the same problem depending on where they sit. I wanted more time in those rooms. Every time we went back to the full group it felt too soon.

The Tahrir trip I already talked about in Part 1. The one thing that would have made it better is more preparation. If someone had told me in advance that I would only be speaking Arabic, I would have had time to mentally prepare. The surprise was useful in the end or maybe I understood it differently.