The Art of Applying in the Age of AI

Using AI Ethically in Grad School Admissions

No matter where or when they served, most Returned Peace Corps Volunteers face the same simple question at the end of their service: what next? For many, graduate school is the natural next step, a way to transform the first-hand, on-the-ground knowledge they developed facilitating development projects into a fulfilling career. 

While all RPCVs honed those project management skills in-country, applying to graduate school can feel like managing several projects at once. Prospective students doing due diligence must compare programs, faculty expertise, tuition, funding opportunities, admission requirements and deadlines, all while creating an application that feels personal and authentic.

Thankfully, organizing and filtering large amounts of data is one of the things AI agents like ChatGPT, Claude, or Microsoft Copilot are particularly good at. But the conscientious applicant must leverage these tools responsibly, and in line with the core Peace Corps value of empowering people, rather than reducing agency — for example, by relying on tools.

To understand how students can use AI thoughtfully when approaching graduate school, WorldView spoke with two RPCVs whose careers have placed them at the intersection of technology, education and international development.

Used responsibly, they believe, artificial intelligence can make the grad school search process less stressful and time-consuming. The key is to treat AI as a resource that supports the applicant — not as a substitute for their ideas, abilities, or voice.

“AI knows data on the internet. AI doesn’t know you,” says Jesse Fowler (Mexico 2019-20), whose career spans education, research and technology-focused roles. But his relationship with technology developed gradually. He studied English in college and initially imagined becoming an English teacher or university professor, before his Peace Corps assignment teaching English at Universidad Tecnológica de Xicotepec de Juárez in Mexico.

That experience gave him what he describes as his first foothold in the technology sector. Since then, technology has remained connected to his work at institutions such as NASA, the United Nations and Cornell University.

“Be more proactive about engaging with technologies,” Fowler advises. “Don’t be afraid of them. Embrace them.”

Rebecca Sharp (Kazakhstan 2009-11) echoes this sentiment, having pursued a path that similarly connects Peace Corps service with a career built around employing technology to address global challenges. After serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan, she went on to serve as a Peace Corps Regional Director and today is CEO of IDinsight, an organization that partners with nonprofits, governments, and funders to provide data and decision-making tools.

Sharp’s work at IDinsight illustrates the importance of evaluating AI in practice. “We are one of the backbone AI evaluators,” she says. That work includes “testing the model’s accuracy” and “qualitative studies of user behavior change.”

Both completed their schooling before conversational AI began to replace Google searches as a way to conduct research, but they see great opportunity in deploying the technology to help applicants find the right grad program and optimize the complexities of the application process.

They present two different perspectives on the responsible role an AI agent can play in supporting applicants at different parts of the process.

Two Kinds of AI Agents

When Fowler applied to graduate school the old fashioned way, he spoke with professors, mentors and trusted people in his network who knew about his ambitions and the programs that might suit him best. He then researched their suggested universities, along with institutions he had identified independently.

The extensive research legwork is where he sees the most use for AI, treating it as a “junior associate” that can organize information, draft communications, and help move a project forward. In that framework, the senior associate (the applicant) still reviews all the work and makes the final decisions.

But anyone who has had the luxury of working with an assistant knows how helpful it can be in managing multiple workstreams. In this sense, applicants can get real value in using their AI agents to create a tracker for deadlines, references, transcripts, test scores and required documents. It can build a week-by-week application timeline, organize scholarship opportunities according to eligibility and due date, or create a comparison table showing the cost and funding available at each institution.

In this way, applicants are outsourcing the structural work, but not the creative work, of the application.

“AI helps you get the ball rolling,” Fowler explains, “but you finish the work, and the work is ultimately your own.”

Sharp shares the same caveats about checking the AI’s outputs, but in her own work as a CEO she has discovered its power as an editor, a second pair of eyes that can help bring other perspectives to your first drafts. 

Rather than asking AI to produce something from scratch, she writes first and then uses the technology to refine, comment on, and edit her ideas. She recommends treating that interaction as a deeply iterative process rather than entering a single prompt, accepting an AI-generated response, and pasting it into a finished product.

That is because AI will often fabricate facts, and it can introduce inaccuracies in what it generates. Especially when application requirements have changed recently, it might provide outdated information on deadlines, current faculty, and other basics.

More importantly, Sharp cautions that a reliance on AI can also remove vital parts of the learning process. She sees more value in using the technology to guide applicants toward deeper research, for example, asking what long-form material someone should read to become knowledgeable about a particular topic.

That will come into play during the various interviews that are part of grad school applications, where applicants will need to be able to express themselves and their experiences in conversation with a real human on the other end, without AI in the room.

Still, AI can generate likely interview questions, conduct a mock interview and provide feedback on answers that are too vague, repetitive, or lengthy. It can also help students prepare thoughtful questions about the program.

Used this way, AI functions less as a replacement for preparation and more as an interactive practice partner. Students can ask for several versions of a question, identify weaknesses in their responses, or practice explaining the same idea in different ways — an approach that reflects Sharp’s preference for using AI iteratively.

Whether using AI as a junior associate to conduct research or as an editor to refine your written application materials, both Sharp and Fowler ultimately emphasize that applicants are responsible for conducting their own due diligence. That includes reviewing each university’s rules concerning AI and disclosure of where it may have been used.

Keeping it Personal

RPCV applicants are at an advantage with the wealth of personal experiences from their service that they can draw from when writing personal essays or preparing for interviews. And while AI may have access to an enormous amount of publicly available information, it does not understand a specific applicant’s life, motivations, or ambitions.

Applicants can of course provide the tool with context about their experiences in the Peace Corps to generate ideas and themes that may resonate with admissions offices, but communicating those unique perspectives requires an authentic voice that isn’t one of the AI’s strengths.

Sharp notes that generative AI can quickly mimic the result of a long writing process, producing something that appears polished, but lacking the personal insights that one gains from the drafting process, which involves introspection, research, and revision that will make the application personal.

“You can now simulate the outcome, but you cannot replace the learning,” she says.

Post-Grad Skills for an AI-Integrated Economy

The upside of all this is that a grad school application is a great place to practice what thoughtful and responsible partnership with AI looks like, a skill that will be essential in the workplace prospective students will encounter after graduation.

Both Fowler and Sharp encourage prospective students to think beyond the application process into what awaits them afterwards and view an AI assistant not as a quick fix to do less work, but as a skill to start developing in a professional sense.

For Sharp, responsible use of AI also means ensuring that the technology does not exacerbate inequality. This is where the local ownership and community-led solutions Sharp learned to value in the Peace Corps come into play.

RPCVs applying to graduate school are often pursuing further study to build on the work they did in service, and their grad school applications should reflect that learning and use AI in service of those goals. The field of AI ethics is in and of itself a career path that many tech-minded RPCVs might find themselves attracted to.

With the right principles driving it, AI can close gaps in access to healthcare, education, and other resources, a clear continuation of the mission that all volunteers commit to when they swear in for their service.

“The potential of AI is just no more and no less than to democratize life-saving, life-improving information for everyone,” Sharp says.

A grad school application is the perfect place to start putting those principles into practice. 

The strongest application will not be the one AI wrote. It will be the one where technology helped the prospective student find the right programs, organized a complicated process and refined their thinking — while leaving the ideas, judgment, curiosity and voice uniquely the applicant’s.

Riya Mehta is a WorldView intern and student at the University of Toronto