Dear future student,

I want to be honest with you from the start: I did not expect much from this course. I came in as someone who had already figured out, more or less, who he was. Engineer. Athlete. Caretaker. I had a clear identity and I was comfortable in it. What I did not expect was that a course would hand me a mirror and ask me to look at it seriously and that I would find someone slightly different staring back.

This is what that looked like, question by question.

1. The Most Impactful Learning Experiences

The course touched me in four directions at once. Here is what shifted in each one:

ABOUT MYSELF

The ALTCV forced me to present myself without the armor of titles. I had to describe who I was beyond “engineer” and what came out surprised me. An athlete who trains through injury. An older brother who has spent years quietly forgoing things for someone else. A person who had built a very complete public identity specifically to avoid showing the more complicated private one. The activity asked me to emphasize things people did not already know about me, and in doing that, I ended up creating a totally new version of myself on the page; one that was more honest than the version I usually show. Creating that document was the first time in a long time I deliberately introduced myself to myself.

IN MY ACADEMIC LIFE

This course built my reflection skills more than any other I have taken. Early in the semester I wrote short, surface-level responses. By the end I was writing paragraphs that actually interrogated my assumptions. I can see the progression clearly when I look back at my earlier blog posts versus later ones. That skill, the ability to slow down and examine why I think what I think, is something I will carry into every future course and paper.

IN MY SOCIAL LIFE

This is where the course hit hardest, and where I changed most; I learned the difference between waiting for your turn to speak and actually listening. I now actively want to hear from people first to find the place where our experiences overlap, and to sit with the place where they do not, rather than rushing to resolve or fix it. That shift sounds small. It is not.

IN MY CAREER

The community interviews on AI and Dr. Zaki’s lecture taught me something I had not thought about as an engineer: that the tools I build and use every day have a human cost that is invisible by design. Comprehending that, not just intellectually but with some real weight to it, changes how I approach the work. Every system I build will be used by people with histories, vulnerabilities, and needs that no algorithm accounts for. That awareness now sits with me when I work.

2. Three Pieces That Show My Learning

If I had to show someone what this course actually did to me, I would use these three assignments:

The ALTCV 

This is where the course started working on me. It shows the moment I tried to present an identity that went beyond what I usually show the athlete, the brother, the person behind the engineering title. It is raw in a way my other work is not, and that rawness is the point. It also captures the first honest answer I gave to the question this course kept asking: who are you when the titles are stripped away?

The Digital Game I Created

I built a game that simulated the daily choices I face as an athlete, student, social butterfly, and caretaker; the constant prioritization, the invisible exhaustion, the trade-offs no one sees. What made it meaningful was not building it but watching others play it. Other students felt the difficulty. They experienced, even briefly, what it is like to be in my position. There was something genuinely soothing about that; about being able to share a struggle and have other people gain real sympathy for it rather than just hear me describe it. 

The Community Interviews on AI and Mental Health (Part of the Soliya Program)

These conversations with people from my community produced responses that were more honest and specific than any reading could have been. The image of a mother getting a recipe from ChatGPT instead of using one passed down through her family still stays with me. It captures something about what we are quietly losing in ways that statistics cannot. 

3. What I Would Change

The professor asked for honesty here, so here it is:

There was no visible structure

Every class felt like a new topic arrived without warning. I never had a clear sense of the course journey; where we had been, where we were going, or how the pieces connected to each other. A simple visual roadmap at the start of the semester showing which themes we would build across which weeks would have helped me engage more intentionally, rather than reacting to each session in isolation. I felt like we were jumping from topic to topic. However, this could be due to the fact that this semester was prone to multiple cancelled classes due to holidays which definitely affected the flow.  

More time for the intercultural experiences

The Soliya sessions and the Tahrir trip were the most alive parts of the course where the theory became real and present. But they were too brief and too contained. I would strongly recommend extending the in-person and virtual intercultural components, not just as one-off events but as threads woven throughout the semester with time to debrief and process what happened in each one. These were not extras. For me, they were the core.

4. Who Should Take This Course

Anyone curious about their identity, the new dawn if AI, and how they see the world should take this course (which, if you think about it, is everyone).

5. The Digital Tools

The course introduced me to tools I had either never used or never used intentionally. Here is my honest assessment of five of them:

Gemini Canvas Mode (genuinely useful, and I kept using it)

I used Canvas mode in Gemini to build my digital game, and it genuinely surprised me. It let me visualize and structure ideas spatially in a way that text-based tools never could. I started using it after the course ended in other areas where I needed to easily create visuals for my ideas such as project structures, process maps, argument outlines. It removed a mental bottleneck I did not know I had. Of all the tools in this course, this is the one that changed my actual workflow.

AI research tools (used, but differently now)

After Dr. Zaki’s lecture and Dr. Gebru’s podcast, my relationship with AI tools shifted. I still use them daily as an engineer, but I am now deliberate about where: for redundant processes that free up cognitive capacity, not as a substitute for real thinking or human interaction. The course gave me a boundary I did not have before. The moment AI starts substituting for discomfort rather than reducing unnecessary friction, it becomes an avoidance mechanism. That distinction now stays with me.

The blogpost platform (reflect.creativitycourse.org) 

Writing publicly changes how you write. Knowing that a real audience might read your reflection, not just a professor, added a kind of accountability that private journaling does not. I wrote more carefully and more honestly because of it. The platform itself was simple, but the idea behind it, public reflection as a practice, is something I want to carry forward.

6. The Intercultural Experiences

The Tahrir trip was one of the genuine highlights of my semester. What made it work was the spontaneity and texture of the interactions. Meeting international students in a real place, with real history around us, created a kind of conversation that a Zoom call simply cannot replicate. There was a cultural transaction happening in both directions, and I felt it. I would not change the format. I would only make it longer and more persistent.

Soliya was similarly valuable. The facilitated dialogue format gave difficult topics, including ones I feel strongly about, a structure that kept the conversation from collapsing into argument. The “Who’s Most Likely To” activity at the end of the final session was unexpectedly meaningful: by that point, we had built enough of a community that we could joke with each other. That ease was its own evidence that something real had been built. You cannot fake that kind of comfort. It has to be earned.

If I could change anything about both experiences: more time, and more continuity. Let the relationships develop beyond a single session or visit. 

To the student reading this: come into this course ready to be uncomfortable. Not dramatically but in the quiet, persistent way that happens when you are asked to sit with questions about who you are and who you assume other people to be.

The most useful thing I leave with is not a skill or a piece of knowledge. It is a habit: to listen before I speak, and to ask what story I am only hearing half of.

That is worth your time.

With honesty,

A student who came in certain and left curious