From deadline panic and revision shortcuts to career anxiety and everyday curiosity, a year’s worth of anonymous prompts reveals how students are really using AI.
These questions go far beyond essay help, exposing patterns of pressure, pragmatism, quiet self-doubt and offering an unfiltered snapshot of student life at King’s today.
So, here’s what KCL students actually asked ChatGPT last year and and trust us, it says far more about you than your degree ever will.
Begging for essay help
You’ve read the question six times and somehow understand it less than the first time. Each word feels like a personal attack and you’re convinced the lecturer wrote it this way to test resilience rather than knowledge. You’re not lazy, you’re just trying to work out what on earth you’re actually being asked to do before you accidentally write 3,000 words answering the wrong question, not a big ask.
After four increasingly desperate café trips and several overpriced coffees bought in the name of “finding motivation” you’re now one desperate email away from asking the module leader for “clarification” and spending the rest of term overanalysing their tone.
Summarise the reading
You never intended to read the reading, you intended to survive it. You’re a strategic academic who considers skimming a skill, not a shortcut and genuinely believes “engagement” is more of a mindset than an activity.
You want to sound informed in seminars without emotionally committing to 80 pages of dense theory written in 1973 by someone deeply opposed to paragraph breaks or endnotes. Efficiency is your love language and you will confidently call this time management, prioritisation and academic self-preservation because we all know the unique frustration of having university work get in the way of your other university work.
The carrier pigeon
You had the audacity to enjoy your winter break, only for January to arrive far too quickly with three 3,000 word essays due in two days. Desperation takes over, and now you must rely on those trusty extensions – but how to phrase it? That is the question.
You’re trying to strike the perfect balance between a responsible adult and a fragile human being hanging on by a thread. You want to sound apologetic but not pathetic, honest but not too honest. You’ll sign off the email “Kind regards,” hit send and then spiral for three hours wondering if you sounded entitled, incoherent or morally corrupt.
Academic regret
You’re in your second year, halfway through your degree, your timetable is suspiciously empty, but your soul is exhausted. You’ve started Googling “alternative careers” and “consulting” despite having no idea what consultants actually do or whether you’d survive in a world where every meeting involves a spreadsheet.
You tell first years to enjoy their uni life while quietly resenting their enthusiasm as you are in the pits of university. You don’t hate your degree, you’re just having an existential crisis triggered by LinkedIn notifications from overachievers who are always “pleased to announce” something and the creeping awareness that everyone else seems to know what they’re doing.
Dissertation dilemma’s
You want academic excellence without unnecessary suffering. You’ve caught yourself saying the phrase “niche, but not too niche” out loud and meant it. You will change your topic at least three times, become emotionally attached to all of them and still insist no one warned you how hard this would be when 17 year old you signed up for this.
You crave originality, approval and a manageable word count, preferably all at once, while secretly envying peers who seem effortlessly inspired. You agonise over every footnote, debate the subtlety of your thesis statement for hours, and convince yourself that spending a weekend staring at an empty word document and endlessly doom scrolling the KCL Library search counts as productive research.
Featured image via Unsplash
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