Close All Tabs - Meet the Grads Grappling With AI and Their Futures

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Everyone seems to have an opinion about AI, but what about those who will likely be affected most — recent graduates? This cohort of grads is unique. They remember what classrooms were like before the emergence of ChatGPT in 2022, and have seen how it transformed the education world seemingly overnight. Today, we hear from three recent graduates in the Bay Area about their thoughts on AI, how it affected their education, and how they feel about their futures.  This week, we’re sharing a recent episode from KQED podcast The Bay — a show that takes an in-depth look at stories from across the SF Bay Area. Read the Transcript here Email us at [e-mail] Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Okay, let's get to the show. Hey, it's Morgan. So Close All Tabs is on vacation this week. Shocking, I know. We do log off sometimes, or at least we try to. But don't worry, we still have an episode for you today. On Closol Tabs, we're always talking about AI, from the way that data centers are changing local communities to the drama that industry billionaires are always getting themselves into. About a year ago, we dove into how some teachers are dealing with the AI boom in their classrooms. Today, we're going to hear the other side of that story, from young people who've been in the thick of but don't always get to share their perspective. Our friends at the Bay, that's another KQED podcast, spoke to a few recent college graduates about AI. This is a really unique cohort of students. They remember what classrooms were like before chat GPT, and they've seen how much has changed learning.

So they spoke to the Bay about how AI affected their college experience and how they feel about entering the workforce in such rapidly changing industries. What are they really thinking about their futures? What's on their minds? All right, here's three recent graduates share their thoughts on AI from the Bay. I'm Alan Montecilio, in for Erica Cruz-Gavara, and welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. I graduated from college 13 years ago, and I got to be honest, no disrespect,

but I don't remember who the commencement speaker was or what they talked about. Most graduation speeches have the same themes, some message about hope, thanking your friends and family, the importance of following your passion, and perhaps a call to change the world for the better. But this graduation season has felt a little different. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. Oh. There have been several videos.

of students booing commencement speakers when they mention AI. And these videos have gone viral. Time magazine selected its person of the year for 2025. And this time, it was the architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting. AI is rewriting production as we sit here. I know it.

Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool. Hey, like I said, you can hear me now, or you can pay me later. Today's college graduates were in school when ChatGPT was first released in late 2022. They've seen it change their classrooms. Today, three recent graduates in the Bay Area

tell us how they really feel about AI and about their futures. This summer, switch to Xfinity and get Wi-Fi so reliable you can host the world. And now you can lock in your price for five years guaranteed. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply, select plans only. Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a question. What happens if we refund tariffs?

Why are groceries so expensive? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to seek. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcast and start seeing how the economy really works. My name is Alina Simentel. I graduated with my master's in kinesiology from San Francisco State. Kinesiology is the study of muscle movement.

It's very interdisciplinary, so there's kind of a lot of different aspects in the field. So we do like sports psychology, you can go into physical therapy, athletic training, occupational therapy. I wanted to be a physical therapist up into a little bit more recently. So I did focus mostly on like muscle physiology class. classes and that types of things. But now I think I want to go more into a little bit more of the psychological motivational side, either doing some kind of city planning that has to do with getting people moving or maybe even working for some type of nonprofit like girls on the run

or things that get people active. So even in undergrad, we take our GOR class, which is like one of the classes that teaches you how to read and write in the field of kinesiology and that type of thing. And midway through the semester, I want to say this was like 2023. Our professor had actually changed the entire course of the class to focus on AI because it had like kind of just come out and she was like, you know, guys, like this is going to be so important in the future. And all of us at that point were kind of like, oh, you know, like, it'll be. come and go, it is what it is. But what's funny sitting back and looking at it now, it's like I feel like she really changed the class for a reason. I think it helped a lot of us just kind of get a grasp on what is AI, how to use it, the advantages maybe and some of the disadvantages.

And so I obviously only took that class once, but I hope that they continue to do that for that class. It's good to have like immediate feedback, right? Like that's, I think, one of the biggest advantages as a student. You don't have to wait for your professor. You know, it's very individualized. And you can really use it to fix specific things in your writing, for example, like writing essays. Like, I think it's a great tool to make you sound professional, help fix your grammar, maybe help you with the formatting. The problem and the drawback is just sometimes it takes over your thinking. It's very easy to just put something in and be like, okay, now write me an essay.

But there's no thought that goes into that. There's no critical thinking that goes into that. And at the end of the day, like, it's kind of taking away from the learning itself. I'm definitely less worried than other fields. I think there's some careers in kinesiology, like if you wanted to be an athletic trainer or maybe like a personal trainer. There's definitely a chance that AI could swoop in and take some of your clients. You can ask for a workout routine on chat GPT so easily. However, the motivational aspect that comes with kinesiology,

and sports psychology that we learn with our degree, I think is more helpful than talking to something online. And just kind of having that like one-on-one human support is a lot more personalized. For example, like I worked in the athletic training department for a little bit. And you can feel the difference in muscle when like a muscle is tense and you can kind of tell what it needs. AI is not going to be hands-on like that. And so having that human interaction in this field specifically is really helpful. I will say, though, that, like, you know, there's just so much negativity around it. And it's kind of hard to, like, take yourself out of, like, the online discourse. My friend works out in kind of like this athletic studio

with some of these tech guys. And they talk about the pros and the cons and, like, how people are being let go. And, you know, but at the same time, time, like maybe there's some jobs that like AI should take over. Like, do people really need to be coding all day, every day sitting on a computer? Like, maybe there's things that humans shouldn't be doing, like computer work all day. Maybe we need to go back outside. I'm looking forward to seeing what's out there, right? Like, I live in San Francisco currently and I can't really see myself moving away anytime soon. I think there's just so much to experience and so many people to meet. Global pandemic, like I was in college. I was taking like 20 units a semester. Every semester

I was taking summer classes, winter classes, and I really chased the academic route. I just turned 24 and I have my master's and I don't think a lot of people can say that. And so I think now kind of like finding what it is exactly that I want to do with it and kind of just getting more experience in the field is really exciting to me. My name is Ada He, and I'm currently a fourth-year student at UC San Diego set to graduate on June 14th. My hometown is San Jose in the Bay Area, and I'm currently studying cognitive science with specialization in machine learning and neural computation. So just to boil down the simple terms, it's basically the study of intelligence. And it's like super duper relevant for machine learning, understanding these computational models of intelligence.

The reason that I chose it and specifically the machine learning and neural computation track was because I think in high school, I knew that I was curious about technology, but I was also curious about more so the neuroscience and psychology side of things. And so I think I was kind of struck by this idea of like what is intelligence, how can we model it computationally? And I think at the time, even then, there was starting to be like these buzzwords around. ML and like AI and how this is going to be the next big thing of the future. And so my very practical future oriented parents were like, you, our child should definitely study something related to technology. And I was like, well, I'm not quite sure. So let me pick this broader major that has to do with technology, but also kind of has to do more with like the philosophy and the psychology and like the ethics of what these systems are.

I think when I first started in college, basically the only place that I was hearing about machine learning, artificial intelligence as a whole, was through theory in my coursework. But I think all of it was very much creative and human-driven. I think where I really started hearing about these AI tools that were in mass production was during my second year of college. So I think in that time, that was when Chatjapiti was sort of released to the public and started using it and it became like the big thing. And suddenly, like, it felt like everyone was talking about childGBT, like, oh, hey, it's pretty smart, I can do all these things.

And my third year at college then, like, after the summer, when we came back to school, then it was taking off. And everyone was using it in their classes. Everyone's, like, asking it questions. And they were using it to code in my programming classes. They were asking it for essay advice. And then I think that was when I started to think, like, wait, isn't that an academic integrity violation? And then, so is AI just being used to, like, help us cheat now? It started out in this very humanistic direction, right?

Like, I was using AI as a tool to investigate these hypotheses and to see if I could get it to predict the patterns that I could predict. They were supposed to be these helpful tools that would help us, like, diagnose bigger problems that were, like, facing people. Like, I've heard of applications of AI to, like, chart patterns of climate change. So in my head, like, I just thought AI and ML had so much potential to be used for good. With chat GPT, I know it's like there's so much progress. now going on in the area of large language models, that I wonder if, like, the other areas

of AI and other use cases are being neglected. It seems like all research is funneling into how these large language models can help us replace white collar jobs suddenly. And I'm like, when did that become the focus of artificial intelligence and machine learning? I think I've been searching for a full-time job since January. As a student who is looking for a white collar job, it's been very, very, very distressing to hear all the discourse that AI is meant to remember. place the work that I've spent four years studying. I think I've honestly lost track by I have to have applied for more than 300 jobs at this point. Just knowing that like the odds of getting a job are so slim even if you do get a callback and then seeing the number of callbacks

I'm getting compared to the number of applications I put out. That is kind of insane to me. I do have summer jobs lined up. I'm currently like I have a student employee at the UC San Diego library and I think like I've been really fortunate to have that environment because working from the web team there feels very meaningful since the work we do is all done by hand. We have a very intentional design approach and the goal of all the work that I've put out there is to serve the student bodies. I think like everything that I've made there has made me like feel good and I don't like feel as much like moral confusion when I think about continuing that work this summer. But that rule like runs until September. So I know that I've like wiggle rooms trying to figure things

out somewhat. Every generation has, like, faced its demons and maybe the world of AI swap and these, like, powerfully generative tools are kind of one of the demons that my generation has to face in the sense that we have to figure out where it fits into our lives and where it fits into our workflows without compromising our morals, because they might be here to stay. And then we also have to figure out, like, how to deal with them in our, like, daily, day-to-day work because it's probably going to be an inseparable part of it, whether we like it or not. My name is Aaron Kim. I graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in political science.

I came in through the community college route, and I started community college in 2019. So I had a couple years to see, like, at least in community college, like what higher education was like before AI, then it dropped, and then I saw everyone kind of like scrambling to react to it. it was really interesting watching the different ways professors would try to handle it. Some of them just had like a no AI policy. Others had like a you have to use AI policy. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I remember really early on there was a professor that told me that like or that told

the class that don't use AI. I can tell if you use AI because I'll take your essay, put it in Chachibati and ask it if it wrote it. There's a bit of a consensus that settled around AI where professors just kind of understood that it's here. So they got more specific on how we're supposed to use this. So they're like, oh, like you can use it for as a writing assistant. You can use it as like to help start your research, but don't use it as a source and

don't make it do all your writing. I know some people that are really hardline against it. I kind of agree with them for the most part. Like I think that AI, especially it's not very sustainable. I feel like it's not very like I think sometimes people over rely on it, which I've seen a lot. But I've also seen it level the playing field, especially for like ESL speakers. Sometimes I'll see people who are like in higher education and they're like not speaking English as a first language. I remember before AI, they were, excuse my language, but they were basically just shit out of luck.

They were going to be judged the same as like a native English speaker. And like sometimes like it just like people were not nice about it. Yeah, I'm like a first-gen college student. So I just kind of went to college because. I don't know. I didn't really know why I was going. I just did it. Not one of those people that was like, oh yeah, I'm going to be a doctor or a lawyer or a dentist. I ended up doing a lot of stuff in the union world and the labor world and like the community organizing world, which is why I think AI has affected me a little less personally, like a little less directly

because none of the jobs that I was really looking for are really AI exposed as much. Luckily, I'm not one of those people, but I do think the implementation of AI and the economy has, like, I've received a lot of the downwind effects. I think a lot of tasks are having AI implemented into it. And because of that, I think there's just less need for a lot of entry-level positions that existed in the past. My friends and I joke about it being a Netbo economy right now because there's just like nobody's getting jobs through applications, at least not a lot.

It's just all like you have to know somebody and that's how you're getting jobs. I'm still trying to really figure out what direction I want to go for that. But right now I'm just like trying to find something in social impact, you know, nonprofits or unions, which is just because that's like, you know, where my heart was at during college. And that's where a lot of my experience was at. But yeah, at this point, I think I just kind of have to try to keep an open mind. I just don't really think this sort of like innovation is really helping most people in a way that's really substantial. Like I feel like, yeah, it's like making things more convenient for a lot of us in like really minor ways. But I just feel like, like, was this all necessary?

but it's like here and we can't like press, there's no undo button for things like this. So I guess I just kind of have to adapt. Luckily, in terms of my personal career trajectory, it still feels pretty peripheral. Because a lot of the organizations I'm interested in working for are concerned with working people-centered kind of policies, I think mass uncritical, enthusiastic adoption of AI is just something that hopefully a lot of them just wouldn't do. Like, how would you feel if you're like working and your union rep is like a chat GPT, like, a chat, GPT, like an iPad on a, like a little thing that rolls around and tries to get you to sign union cards, right? Like, that's kind of something that AI can never take away.

It's like because so much of organizing jobs or so much of organizing is based on building trust human to human, you know. And that's just something AI can never do. I hope. That was Alina Simintel, Ada He, and Aaron Kim. This episode was cut down and edited by me and producer Jessica Carissa. It was also produced by Erica Kemp. Cruz Guevara. Additional support from Pauline Bartoloni, music courtesy of audio network. Support for the Bay is provided in part by the OSHA production fund. Some members of the KQED

podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and radio artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. If you want to get in touch with us here at the Bay, please send us an email at the bay at kQED.org. The Bay is a production of KQED public media in San Francisco. You can help power our show by becoming a member at kQED.org slash donate. I'm Alan Montecilio, in for Erica Cruz-Govara. Thanks for listening. Hey, it's Morgan again. You can listen to more of the bay wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Close All Tabs. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love

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