Final Reflection

By Ismail Tolba | CORE 2096 | May 21, 2026

 

1. Most Impactful Learning Experiences

About Myself: Confidence Can Be a Blindspot

One of the most unexpected realizations I had this semester came from watching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Danger of a Single Story TED Talk, which was assigned as part of the pre-Soliya reflection. I have always taken pride in my ability to understand multiple perspectives, and it is honestly something people around me point out a lot as one of my strengths. But this video made me face something uncomfortable: my confidence in that ability was itself a kind of single story. I had been telling myself a flattering narrative about how open-minded I am, while still carrying implicit biases I had never actually examined.

 

This hit harder than I expected. It did not just change how I see other cultures. It made me question my confidence across all areas of my life, and whether what I feel as conviction is sometimes just unexamined certainty. That is not a comfortable thought, but it is a useful one.

 

Something else also connected to this. When the course explored how translation affects meaning, how certain words do not carry over between languages, and how the structure of a language shapes how you think, I started connecting it to my own experience as a trilingual person. I had never consciously thought of my multilingualism as an intellectual asset. But the course gave me a framework for understanding why I tend to approach problems the way I do. Learning French did not just add a language, it added a whole dimension of thinking. I am now more intentional about seeing that as something to develop rather than just something I happen to have.

For My Academic Life: Using AI as a Critical Collaborator, Not a Crutch

The module on cognitive and communicative keys for AI was probably the most practically useful part of this course for me academically. The core idea, which is that you should challenge AI rather than just accept what it produces, sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it genuinely reframed how I interact with tools like Claude every day.

 

Before this course, I used AI mostly as an accelerant. I gave it tasks and took the outputs. After this course, I use it more like a sparring partner. I ask it to challenge my assumptions, generate counterarguments, or test whether my reasoning actually holds up. This shift has improved my critical thinking rather than replacing it. As a data science and business entrepreneurship double major, that is not a small adjustment. It is a fundamentally different relationship with a tool I rely on daily.

 

The risk I now actively try to manage is what Dr. Ahmed Tolba pointed to in my interview with him, which is over-reliance. AI can think for you in a way that slowly weakens the habit of thinking for yourself. Being more aware of that has actually made me a better AI user.

For My Social Life: Hospitality as Something Worth Being Proud Of

Soliya was where this clicked for me. Sitting in those sessions and listening to people from completely different backgrounds talk about their cultures, I found myself doing something I rarely do, which is actively reflecting on my own.

 

Explaining Egyptian hospitality to people who had never experienced it, and watching their genuine surprise, made me realize how much I had taken it for granted. The things we do without thinking, like insisting that a guest eats more, or making a stranger feel like family immediately, are not universal. They are specific and meaningful and worth being proud of. Soliya gave me the perspective to appreciate my own culture from the outside, which is something I did not think I needed until I experienced it.

For My Career: AI is Infrastructure, Not a Feature

The AI in Your Profession assignment was probably the most directly career-relevant thing I did in this course. Not because it taught me technical skills, but because it forced me to seriously question assumptions I had been holding without realizing it.

 

I interviewed Dr. Ahmed Tolba, the business department chair at AUC, and Mohamed ElFekki, the founder of Autopulse. What stood out to me was not where they agreed but where they differed. Dr. Tolba represented a thoughtful, cautious perspective: AI is powerful, use it carefully. ElFekki showed me something more concrete: a company where AI compressed an eight-month project into two months, where every technical employee uses AI tools daily, and where the whole company culture is built around AI adoption. I had actually interviewed ElFekki about a year earlier for a different project, and the shift in how central AI had become to Autopulse in just one year was genuinely striking evidence of how fast things are moving.

 

As someone who wants to build startups, this changed how I think about planning. AI is not something you add as a competitive advantage later. It is infrastructure you build from day one. Dr. Tolba’s point about AI consultancy firms being one of the strongest current business opportunities in Egypt also stuck with me. It is a market gap I had not really thought about before but that now feels genuinely worth exploring.

 

2. Three Things That Best Show My Learning

1. AI in Your Profession Reflection – This is the piece I am most proud of because it required me to go beyond surface-level observations about AI and actually engage with contradictions. The contrast between ElFekki’s full adoption of AI and Dr. Tolba’s more measured academic view forced me to form my own position rather than just summarize what others said. The reflection is genuinely mine, and it changed how I think about my career trajectory in a way that a reading or lecture probably would not have.

 

2. Pre-Soliya Reflection – This was where I first seriously engaged with the single story concept and what it meant for how I see myself. Writing it was the beginning of the self-examination I described above. Looking back at it now, I can clearly trace a connection between what I wrote there and how I approached Soliya when it actually happened.

 

3. Intercultural Learning Reflection – The Tahrir field trip was my favorite experience in this course, and this reflection captures why. I went in with low expectations and came out genuinely moved, by the foreigners’ Arabic, by discovering that Arabic does not have a direct equivalent for “interesting,” and by laughing with classmates I had not really connected with before. It documents a real shift in how I relate to Arabic literature and language that I honestly did not see coming.

3.What I Would Change About the Course

1. Give the course a clear structure and phases.

 

This is the change I feel most strongly about. Right now the course connects intercultural learning, AI literacy, and digital literacy in a way that is intellectually interesting but practically confusing. When someone asks me what this course is about, I genuinely cannot give a clean answer. That does not necessarily mean the course is doing something wrong since the connections between these topics are real and worth exploring, but students need a map.

 

What I would suggest is dividing the semester into clear phases with a brief framing at the start of each one: “For the next three weeks, we are focusing on X, and here is how it connects to what we did before.” This would not make the course more rigid. It would make the richness more accessible. Right now the links between the big ideas feel abstract when they could feel intentional.

 

2. Give Soliya more structure before and during the sessions.

 

Soliya had real value in terms of the cultural exchange and the conversations about identity and hospitality, but it felt understructured. There was no clear framework going in for what we were actually trying to accomplish or how to make the most of the time. Because of that, some sessions felt like they just drifted.

 

Something as simple as a pre-session brief with three things to pay attention to and one thing to try would have made the experience significantly more intentional. The conversations were good, but the scaffolding needed work.

 

3. Make the course identity more explicit from week one.

 

Related to the first point: I think students would get a lot more out of this course if they understood from the very beginning why these three topics are being taught together. The underlying argument of the course seems to be that intercultural learning, AI literacy, and digital literacy are all dimensions of what it means to be a thoughtful and capable person right now. That is a compelling argument. But it was never stated directly, so many of us spent the first half of the semester trying to figure out what the connecting thread was, instead of actively looking for it.

 

4. Who Should Take This Course?

Anyone who is driven and capable but has not yet seriously questioned the assumptions, blind spots, and cultural defaults that shape how they think. This course will do that work on you in ways you will not fully see coming.

 

5. Reflection on Digital Tools

The Course Blog (TRU Writer / SPLOT) – This was genuinely my favorite tool in the course, and I say that as someone who came in skeptical. The idea of publishing your assignments on a shared blog where classmates can actually read and respond to them is new to me, and I think it changes the quality of what you produce. You write differently when you know someone other than the professor is going to read it. You become more careful with your arguments, more honest in your reflections, and more aware that you are communicating to an actual audience. It also created a sense of accountability and community that a private submission system does not. I want to keep publishing my thoughts publicly in some form because I think it is a genuinely good habit.

 

Claude (AI) – I used Claude both in and outside this course, but the course changed how I use it. Before, I treated it like a search engine that also writes. After the module on cognitive and communicative keys for AI, I started treating it more like a thinking partner that I should push back on rather than just accept. I now use it to stress-test ideas, generate opposing arguments, and find the gaps in my own reasoning. I also used it practically for things like building a Monte Carlo simulation for an application marketplace project, where it allowed me to execute something that would have taken weeks in a fraction of the time. I will keep using Claude both professionally and academically, but the key shift is intentionality. I use it with a specific goal and I verify its outputs rather than just accepting them.

 

The Narrative Game Assignment – The Student vs. Athlete game was a different kind of tool. It was actually a reflective instrument. Building a narrative game around something as personal as five years of professional football and the decision to stop playing forced me to process something I had not really fully faced. It was unexpectedly emotional. I did not expect a course assignment to help me make peace with a major life decision, but it did. The game design format was more than a creative exercise. It was a structured form of reflection that I think could honestly be applied to a lot of other areas of personal development.

 

NotebookLM – I actually knew about NotebookLM before this course, but the course made me actually want to try it. Now I use it a lot and find it genuinely helpful. Being able to upload your own sources and have AI answer questions specifically from those materials, rather than from the general internet, is a completely different experience. It is much more reliable for studying and research because you know exactly where the information is coming from. I use it now for organizing notes, reviewing before exams, and making sense of large amounts of reading. It is one of those tools that I will keep using long after this course.

 

AI in Your Profession as a Research Method – The combination of AI-assisted research and real interviews gave me a model I intend to use professionally. Using Claude to research how AI is used in entrepreneurship and then comparing that to what actual practitioners told me in interviews made both AI’s strengths and its weaknesses very clear. AI is good for breadth, speed, and synthesis. But it underplays risk, it lacks lived experience, and it cannot tell you what it actually feels like to compress an eight-month project into two months. That combination of AI research and human interviews is something I will keep using.

 

6. Reflection on Intercultural Experiences

Soliya had real value but it needed more structure. The conversations about culture were genuinely illuminating. Discovering my own pride in Egyptian hospitality, hearing others describe their traditions, and finding common ground across very different backgrounds were all meaningful. But the sessions often felt like they were building toward something that was never quite reached. A clearer framework going in, with specific prompts, a defined goal for each session, and even just a brief debrief at the end, would have made the whole experience more focused and more memorable.

 

The Tahrir Field Trip was the highlight of the semester for me. I went in with very low expectations and left with a completely different relationship to my own language and culture. Trying to translate the word “interesting” into Arabic with a group of people who actually cared about getting it right, and discovering that Arabic resists that kind of direct mapping, was more intellectually alive than most classroom experiences I have had. It also broke the ice with classmates I had not connected with before, which genuinely changed the dynamic of the course for the rest of the semester. If anything I would have wanted more time there, and a structured reflection right after while the experience was still fresh.

 

AI Disclosure Statement: I used Claude (claude.ai) to help organize, outline and brainstorm this reflection. All experiences, opinions, realizations, and course-specific references are genuinely mine. I did not use AI to invent content or substitute for my own reflection. You can view the interaction here