How ChatGPT became my study buddy

How ChatGPT became my study buddy

As a student, it's easy to feel like you're constantly drowning in a sea of assignments, exams, and never-ending lectures. It's tough to stay motivated and focused when you're constantly juggling a million different tasks, and traditional study tools like tutoring, note-taking, and flashcards can feel like they're just not keeping up with the demands of your busy student life.

But don't panic just yet. ChatGPT is here to save the day (Ghostbusters reference!) or at least make it a little bit easier.

The emotion of discovering ChatGPT's capabilities

Even though it's only been a month or so, I'm having a hard time remembering the first few moments of using ChatGPT. Instead, I remember a cold afternoon in early December.

I was sitting with my friends in the lobby of my university's computer science department, waiting for the next lecture. That morning we had an algorithms and data structures lecture about dynamic programming (a topic that in hindsight, we would have understood, but which in those days was still difficult for us).

The professor told us to solve the matrix chain multiplication problem in Java using dynamic programming. I was looking at the Java class he gave us to implement when suddenly the light bulb went on: why not ask ChatGPT how to do it?

I spent twenty minutes chatting with ChatGPT - or Johnny as we called him for simplicity and fun - about how some methods should or should not be implemented or how dynamic programming worked. I took the result code from our discussion. I copied it into IntelliJ. Run tests. All green.

I well remember the feeling of euphoria. I remember me running outside yelling at my colleagues "it works!" like we just wrote the most revolutionary code in the world.

I know what you're thinking. That's cut-and-paste programming! More or less. And it's not the type of programming I want to encourage. I just wanted to tell you this little story because it was the key moment where I stopped and thought: the world is changing. Within minutes I realized all the possible ways ChatGPT could have helped me in my education if it existed before.

How I started using ChatGPT as my study buddy

As I said in the beginning, being a student at university can be frustrating. Very frustrating. So I started trying to integrate ChatGPT into my work/study routine to help me focus on truly learning. In an ethical way. What do I mean by "in an ethical way"? I mean he's not doing the bloody Java exercises for me!

Regarding this, I attach a Tweet of mine from a short time ago.

It helps you understand better

I strongly believe that one of ChatGPT's strengths is its ability to maintain context and initiate conversations by linking to previously said things. This has proven helpful in the stage of absorbing and learning the concepts.

When I talked with ChatGPT about dynamic programming, it was able to give me precise explanations of what I was asking of him.

Here's an example:

First explanation

Detailed example applied to matrix chain multiplication

In one of the first lessons on dynamic programming, I experimented. While the professor was explaining, I kept ChatGPT at hand asking him to explain to me what the professor was explaining. And if I still didn't understand, I asked it to explain it again or to go deeper with examples. It gave me about five examples in the space of ten minutes. And one of those examples was then made by the professor in the following minutes.

Am I saying ChatGPT is better than a professor? No. But it's certainly a very valid study partner.

It guides you in exercises

Talking about something more practical. Do you remember the Java class I talked about earlier? Here's a summary of the class.

public class MatrixMultiplicationSolver {
     // sequence of the dimensions of the matrices to multiply
     private List<Integer> p;
     // minimum cost matrix
     private int[][]m;
     // matrix of choices of k that correspond to the minimum cost
     private int[][]b;

     public void solve() {
        // TODO Implement
     }
    public String traceBack(int i, int j) {
        // TODO Implement
    }
    ...
}

Believe it or not, after some effort ChatGPT was able to correctly implement the missing methods, explaining the reasoning and the logic behind it step by step. Of course, it's always there for any clarification I need on every single line of code!

Does this mean that from now on, AI will be the ones to code? That we students can have computers do our exams and clients can have computers do the work they need to do? Absolutely not.

It makes your weekly schedule

Although I am famous among my friends and colleagues for being the most organized in recent months I have found it difficult to manage my time as my university commitments have increased.

Reconciling exams, study sessions, tutoring, sports and passions is difficult in these situations. Can ChatGPT help us with this too? Obvious.

I explained to it what tasks I have to complete, what my usual timetables are, and what my weekly commitments are. Based on this, I asked it to plan my week. Here's the result:

There are some things to refine. For example, it understood by itself that between 1 PM and 2 PM I have a lunch break. But it seems to have forgotten that we humans have also dinner around 8 PM!

AI breaking into our computers

While ChatGPT is the most popular at the moment due to its incredibly fast spread across the globe, other companies are developing their own models.

Notion, for example, recently started embedding an AI writing assistant in their app.

The same happened with Craft, one of Notion's competitors.

Even HashNode itself confirmed that soon their new editor Neptune will have AI under the hood to help us write.

ChatGPT is only the beginning.

Conclusions

What I've shown you here is only 1% of what ChatGPT can do. There are a thousand other ways and a thousand fields of application of this incredible technology (once I used ChatGPT to help my neighbors with pure chemistry exercises).

I know that ChatGPT is a free research preview. I know it may not be accurate or give incorrect answers. I know that there are other models, created by giants like Google, incredibly more advanced hidden within the walls of Silicon Valley. I know ChatGPT isn't the first and won't be the last of its kind.

But what a game-changer!