“Not a Substitute, But a Voice Amplifier”: Students Reframe AI

A recap of The City Tutors × Landing Point workshop: AI Skills for School & Career

For many CUNY students, education is never just their own. They juggle classes with work shifts, help cover rent or tuition, translate documents for family members, or act as the first in their households to navigate higher education. Their success sustains not only their ambitions but their families’ stability.That weight changes the stakes of new technology. With artificial intelligence now embedded in classrooms, job applications, and workplaces, not knowing how to use it—or how it evaluates you—can carry sharper consequences. A résumé flagged incorrectly by an algorithm, an essay misread by plagiarism software, or a missed chance to use AI productively isn’t a small setback. For these students, the margin for error is thin.That urgency defined AI Skills for School & Career, a workshop hosted by The City Tutors in partnership with Landing Point, a recruiting firm. The session was led by Faizel “Fez” Khan, who builds and applies AI inside Landing Point’s recruiting practice. He wasn’t there to recite slides; he came as a practitioner, eager to show students both the power and the limits of the systems they’ll face.

Fez: “AI isn’t a shortcut; it’s a force multiplier. In recruiting, we use it daily, and we teach students to do the same—ethically, with sources cited, and with clear prompts that make the work better, not lazier.”

FROM DOUBT TO DISCOVERY

Claudio Joel Bautista Martinez, an English honors student at Lehman College, arrived unconvinced.“As an English major, I assumed AI was a substitute for substance. To those who don’t understand how to use it, it can become a way for human intelligence to atrophy.”After a one-on-one exchange with Fez, his view changed:“I began to see AI not as a substitute, but as a voice amplifier. My efforts to control language as a writer have equipped me to be a stronger prompt engineer.”

LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF PROMPTS

A core lesson was the difference between system prompts (setting behavior and tone) and user prompts (giving direction). That simple mental model helped students move from “trying things” to engineering outcomes.

Andy Boccio (CEO of Landing Point): “Students shouldn’t be guessing what the algorithm wants. Give them the mental models: how AI reads, ranks, and reasons, so they can spot bias, fix errors, and put their best work forward.”For students with limited time, that’s powerful: a good prompt can cut study time, sharpen an application, and turn a messy task into a manageable one.

ETHICS AND THE FUTURE OF WORK

The group discussed the CUNY AI Policy (2024)—instructor permission required and attribution mandated when AI assists—and weighed risks (plagiarism, bias, privacy) alongside opportunities (speed, clarity, access).

Carlo Coumoutsos (CFO at Landing Point): “Mastering AI now is career insurance. The tools will change, but the habits of experimenting, verifying, and attributing will travel with you from the classroom to the first job.”Students also examined how quickly hiring tools evolve and what that means for early careers. The takeaway: adapting beats avoiding.

A PARTNERSHIP THAT OPENS DOORS

The City Tutors serves first-generation and immigrant students who already encounter AI in admissions, coursework, and job applications. Landing Point, as a recruiting firm, brought the recruiter’s perspective and, through this collaboration, served students directly by sharing how AI is used in real hiring workflows and offering practical ways to use it ethically, with attribution, and for better outcomes.

Landing Point: “As a leader in recruiting, we feel a responsibility to pass on what we’ve learned. This session was special: we shared our AI engineering playbook so students could study and build with AI—ethically, with attribution, and with prompts that actually improve outcomes.”

WHAT CHANGED

Students left with skills and with agency. They learned how to talk to AI, how to check its work, and how to decide when it helps (and when it doesn’t). Most importantly, they saw AI not as an inevitability to fear, but as a system they can learn, test, and bend toward their goals.

As Martinez put it: “What I once saw as a threat, I now recognize as a robust tool.”