In the quiet moments between classes, I often find my thoughts splitting into a thousand directions, like light through a prism. One second I'm considering medical school, the next I'm designing virtual worlds, and somewhere in between, I'm contemplating whether these career paths will even exist in their current form when I get there. My mind feels like a browser with too many tabs open—each one essential, each one demanding attention. Some might call it ADHD; I call it living in 2025.
Yesterday, my English professor mentioned something that struck me: MLA citation guidelines for websites were only created three decades ago. It seems almost quaint now, like teaching someone to operate a horse-drawn carriage. In just three years, we've watched generative AI evolve from producing basic texts to crafting nuanced arguments that rival PhD-level discourse. OpenAI’s o3 model can now engage in complex Ph.D. level theoretical discussions that would have seemed impossible even a year ago. It makes me wonder: what are we really preparing for when we write these college application essays?
The irony doesn't escape me that while I'm writing about the future of human thought, my words might be among the last generation of purely human-generated essays. But perhaps that's exactly why they matter more now than ever. In the shower tonight—where all my best thoughts seem to occur and evaporate just as quickly—I realized something: maybe the point isn't to have a clear trajectory anymore. Maybe adaptability itself is the skill we need most.
When I try to envision myself five years from now, the image blurs like a photograph taken in motion. Will we still write essays, or will we be co-creating with AI, focusing more on curation and critical thinking than raw production? Will the very concept of a "career path" become obsolete in a world where jobs transform faster than university programs can adapt to teach them?
What fascinates me most is the dance between human consciousness and artificial intelligence—like two celestial bodies orbiting each other, each warping the other's gravitational field. Sometimes I imagine my thoughts as a garden where wild ideas grow freely, untamed and unpruned, while AI's thoughts are like a perfectly manicured French garden, precise but perhaps missing the beauty of chaos. The thinking process isn't just a journey anymore; it's becoming an art form in itself, like jazz improvisation in a world of perfectly composed classical pieces.
My thoughts don't follow the clean, algorithmic paths that AI excels at—they leap like quantum particles, existing in multiple states simultaneously. One moment I'm contemplating neural networks, the next I'm wondering if consciousness is just the universe's way of experiencing itself, and somehow these seemingly disconnected thoughts weave together into a tapestry that makes sense only to the human mind. It's messy, inefficient, and gloriously alive.
So when people ask about my goals after high school, I think of water. Water doesn't have a goal, yet it shapes mountains, creates valleys, and finds paths where none existed before. It adapts, transforms, and maintains its essential nature while changing everything it touches. Perhaps that's what I'm meant to do—not follow a predetermined path, but flow through the landscape of future possibilities, carving new channels as the terrain of technology and society shifts beneath us.
In this era where artificial intelligence can replicate human output with increasing precision, maybe our greatest strength lies not in our ability to think linearly or logically, but in our capacity to dream illogically, to make impossible connections, to be brilliantly, unapologetically undefined. While AI excels at finding patterns in chaos, we excel at finding beauty in uncertainty, meaning in randomness, and possibility in the unknown.
After all, in a future where everything can be optimized, maybe the most valuable thing we can offer is our beautiful inefficiency, our glorious inconsistency, our ability to find meaning in the spaces between the logical and the absurd. I don't need a map—I am the cartographer of my own undefined future, drawing boundaries that shift like sand dunes in the wind of change.