From Tech Consumers to Creators: AI, Agency, and Student Work with Alexander Kutulas

Hey, welcome back to another edition of AGI Schools Out Saturdays, where we're preparing kids for their future, not our past. Some of these guests are preparing themselves for their future, not our past. I got Alexander Katoulas with me today, another Boilermaker. We love our Boilermakers around here. I got two of them that have graduated out of my house. Go, Purdue. Alex, introduce yourself. You're a senior in computer science at Purdue. Tell everybody a little bit of your story and your background and what you got going on.

All right, so first of all, thanks for having me on, Jason. Pleasure to be here. I am a, like you said, I'm a senior studying computer science. I have a minor in electrical engineering technology, which is the Polytechnics College's flavor of electrical engineering, certificate in entrepreneurship and innovation. A lot of the work I end up doing is the intersection of event organization and translating human experiences to allow students to get the most out of them. So in the past, I've ran large charity streams. I put on Hack from Scratch, which was a collaboration with the Scratch Foundation. It involved 20 different clubs from your tech organizations, your creative organizations, your arts organizations, just getting together for kind of a good cause. And then this Current semester, I'm working on a project called Milestone, where my focus is helping students document their club experiences so they can translate that to the workforce and hopefully help them get that first interview.

That is awesome. So let's let's start. I got a lot of thoughts from what you just said. Let's just start by dispelling a few bits. Right. I could tell. And your friend who I had on here as well, like you guys have great personalities. Let's just dispel this whole like everybody in computer science is like an introvert because that has not been my I'm a vibe coder. Right. I don't have that. a software background, but I have been very welcome into every group of software developers and everybody else that I've met with. And yes, I have met some introverted people, but that, for the most part, has not been my experience. Is that your experience with your classmates, that they're all kind of nerdy introverts who don't want to talk to people, or is that a 50-50, or...

It's an interesting question for sure. I would say, you know, it really depends on the person and the group. But in general, honestly, I found that the nerdy people are the ones that really want to talk to people, to be honest. I mentioned I'm rolling out, deploying some software with Purdue Hackers later to actually document the awesome stuff that Purdue Hackers, one of the clubs on campus does. And literally, it's just a group of like, you usually have 50 to 70 kids who are like the nerdiest kids that you could find, right? That just get together and just yap about tech for, you know, for a couple hours, work on fun projects and stuff like that. With regards to classes, you'll find a wide variety of people working on things from a bunch of different topics. I'm taking human-computer interaction actually this semester. literally the last class we did was just people presenting the