So, before you get the wrong impression, I’m 40. Last year I enrolled in a master program in IT to further my career. It is a special online master offered by a university near me and geared towards people who are in fulltime employement. Almost everybody is in their 30s or 40s. You actually need to show your employement contract as proof when you apply at the university.
Last semester I took a project management course. We had to find a partner and simulate a project: Basically write a project plan for an IT project, think about what problems could arise and plan how to solve them, describe what roles we’d need for the team etc. Basically do all the paperwork of a project without actually doing the project itself. My partner wrote EVERYTHING with ChatGPT. I kept having the same discussion with him over and over: Write the damn thing yourself. Don’t trust ChatGPT. In the end, we’ll need citations anyway, so it’s faster to write it yourself and insert the citation than to retroactively figure them out for a chapter ChatGPT wrote. He didn’t listen to me, had barely any citation in his part. I wrote my part myself. I got a good grade, he said he got one, too.
This semester turned out to be even more frustrating. I’m taking a database course. SQL and such. There is again a group project. We get access to a database of a fictional company and have to do certain operations on it. We decided in the group that each member will prepare the code by themselves before we get together, compare our homework and decide, what code to use on the actual database. So far whenever I checked the other group members’ code it was way better than mine. A lot of things were incorporated that the script hadn’t taught us at that point. I felt pretty stupid becauss they were obviously way ahead of me - until we had a videocall. One of the other girls shared her screen and was working in our database. Something didn’t work. What did she do? Open a chatgpt tab and let the “AI” fix the code. She had also written a short python script to help fix some errors in the data and yes, of course that turned out to be written by chatgpt.
It’s so frustrating. For me it’s cheating, but a lot of professors see using ChatGPT as using the latest tools at our disposal. I would love to honestly learn how to do these things myself, but the majority of my classmates seem to see that differently.
So in 2015 I made a career move from doing a lot of project management in a STEM field into Data Science. I had the math and statistics background but no coding experience which not necessary for the program. It was a program for working professionals with all classes in the evening or weekends so a similar program set up. For each course we went through a topic and then had an example programing language where we could apply this concept. So during this program I started with 0 programming languages known and ended up with like a dozen where I at least touched it. Most people had one or two programming languages that they used for their job which they relied on.
It was a difficult program since I had to learn all of this from scratch but it taught me how to learn a new programming language. How to google the correct terms, how to read documentation, how to learn a new syntax and how to think to write in code. This was the most valuable thing I learned from this program. For you focus on what you are learning and use the tools that assist with that. That means using ChatGPT to answer your questions, or pull up documentation for you or even to fix an error if you get stuck, (especially syntax errors since it can get frustrating to find that missing comma but its a valuable skill to practice). Anyone who is having their code full written by them are missing the learning how to learn.
For SQL its kind of struggle to learn because its an odd language. Struggle and you will learn the concepts you need. Using ChatGPT for everything will be a huge disservice for them since they won’t learn all the concepts if you jump ahead. Some of these more advanced functions are way more complex to troubleshoot and won’t work on certain flavors of SQL. Struggle and learn and you will do great