Brown University · Center for Master's Student Excellence · Oct 1, 2026

Unbreakable.

How to AI-proof your job search, career and future - your Brown recap

Go Bears! 🐻 Huge love to Kevin, Marli and Arman for braving the hot seat (and to Abdul, Makanoon, Jenny, George, Victor, Katja and Morgan for the juiciest questions I've had all fall). You turned a Thursday lunch hour into a master class of your own.

And the biggest thanks to Caitlin - our master of ceremonies, who stepped in so beautifully while Komal was away - the dynamic duo on College Hill who are in your corner for the whole journey. Everything we covered is below, ready to use tonight. 👇

The big idea

Three principles for a career that's unbreakable

It's a crazy moment out there - and we can't control any of it. The only thing we can control is what we do with our own time. So instead of cursing our fates, we took three actions today: choose the path that's right for you (not just what was hot yesterday), master AI but apply it wisely, and lean into relationships, which matter now more than ever.

1

Get Focused

Choose the path that's right for you today - not just what was hot yesterday. Start with your ikigai, then learn from the Brown alums already living it.

Demo: Kevin's ikigai
2

Get Balance

Master AI - but apply it wisely. Use it as a complement to get found by recruiters, never as a substitute for your own story.

Demo: Marli's makeover
3

Get Relationships

Relationships matter - now, more than ever. Get a referral at any organization in the world, even if you don't know a soul there today.

Demo: Arman's referral

Tap any step to jump to its copy-paste prompts.

1Get Focused

Choose the path that's right for you today

Pop quiz recap

Which major has the highest unemployment rate today?

A) Computer science - and Abdul called it right out of the gate: entry-level programming is exactly what AI does well, so companies outsource it or automate it. For 25 years coding was the scarcest skill in the labor market. Then ChatGPT showed up in the fall of 2022 and the scarcity flipped to the human skills we thought everyone had.

Good news for Kevin and every CS Bear: the data isn't the destruction of CS jobs, it's a specific hit on entry-level roles. Junior developers write basic code. Senior developers lead teams, inspire people and understand customers. Be the coder who can also do that.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates
Computer science
6.1%
Philosophy
3.2%
Art history
3.0%

See the original ikigai diagram - don't stumble from one random thing to the next. Start with who you are, then connect it to what the world needs.

Kevin's ikigai, live

A fifth-year CS master's student who's great at understanding problems, figuring out where things go wrong and asking the right questions - and who's lit up by learning how things work alongside incredible peers. Ten job titles came back, and #1 jumped out: product manager. Technical skills, teammates and customers - a lot of what motivates Kevin in one seat.

Then the trap we all fall into: chasing a role because it sounds sexy, without knowing if it's right for us. So we went to the alumni tool and found Renee, a Brown alum doing product at a startup in San Francisco - and turned her into Kevin's first expert interview. 🔥

💛Lead with learning, not asking. "Brown student looking for a job" gets ignored. "Brown student looking to learn from your expertise" gets a yes - because generativity, the drive to share what we've learned, is one of the most powerful motivators there is.
🎙️Jenny's cheat code: talk, don't type. The power of these tools is directly proportional to the context you give them. "What should I do with my life?" gets generic answers. Your passions, your skills and what you're trying to do in the world gets real ones - so I speak it in with a dictation tool like Wispr Flow. Fellow elder millennials, this one's for us.

Find your path - and the Bear who's walked it

  1. Run Prompts 1 and 2 to turn your strengths and passions into ten specific job titles - the language recruiters actually hire in. (Yes, even with imposter syndrome. AI brings the gifts to the surface.)
  2. Open the Brown alumni tool on LinkedIn - 100,000 Brown alums, built by my team for exactly this crossroads - and search the role that intrigues you.
  3. Don't click Message, and don't pay $50 a month for Premium (Kevin's instinct was right). LinkedIn's dirty little secret: lots of users, very little usage. Renee checks that inbox maybe once a year.
  4. Her email? Ten times a day. Use Prompt 3 to crack the company's address format - AI is a very good email detective.
  5. Beat stranger danger: click Mutual connections and ask for a warm intro. The Brown alumni don't hate you - they just don't know you exist yet. Warm intros crush cold outreach every time.
  6. On the alum's profile, click the three dots > Save to PDF, then run Prompt 4 so the conversation is about you in the role, not just the role.
PROMPT 1Surface your strengths
What are three of my biggest strengths?

Works best in an AI you've been using for a while - it already knows you. No history yet? Tell it about yourself first.

PROMPT 2Cross the ikigai chasm
What are 10 specific job titles that really match my skills and passions?

You don't have to be a software developer just because you studied CS. Product management, solutions engineering, AI roles - the world is bigger than one title.

PROMPT 3Crack the email pattern
What is the most common email format for employees at [Company]?

For Persona it came back in seconds: first name at withpersona.com. Now you're in the one inbox that actually gets read.

PROMPT 4Prep the conversation · the ultimate LinkedIn + AI hack
What are 10 questions for this alum to discover if her role is an awesome fit for my skills and my passions? [upload the alum's LinkedIn profile PDF]

Kevin's questions were already juicy (day to day, why she stays, how AI has changed the role). This goes one step further: a dossier on what matters most for you.

Makanoon asked
What subject line should we use when we email an alum? Warm intros are the gold standard. But if no one can connect you, warm up your own outreach: "Brown student looking to learn from your expertise." Same tribe, and I'm here to learn, not to sell you anything. Then be clear in the body: "Hi Renee, I'm a current Brown master's student at a bit of a career crossroads between software development and product management - and I see you've navigated that decision yourself. I know you must be slammed, but any chance you have even 10 minutes to share your expertise over Zoom next week?" In three sentences you've gone from stranger to member of her community, and you've made it easy to say yes.
Caitlin added
"This is exactly what we tell our students to do." Download the profile, personalize the questions, make the connection real - and use AI to explore, not just to blast out resumes. If this sounds familiar, it's because your career team has been saying it all along. Go book time with them.
2Get Balance

Master AI - but apply it wisely

Pop quiz recap

When BCG gave its consultants ChatGPT, how did they perform?

C) Both - George nailed it: it came down to how they used it. Consultants who used AI to brainstorm new ideas were dramatically more productive. Consultants who told AI "just do my job" actually got worse.

This is Econ 101. AI as a complement adds superpowers to what you already do. AI as a substitute replaces your human voice with a machine that doesn't know your customers as well as you do. You'll make this call a hundred times in your job search - here's how to make it right on your LinkedIn profile.

Source: Harvard Business School + BCG, "Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier" (2023)
+40%higher-quality work when AI complemented the consultants' creative tasks
19 ptsless likely to get the answer right when AI substituted for their judgment
1. Job titleAre you all in on the role I'm hiring for?
2. LocationCan you do it where I need you?
3. SkillsDo I trust you to be effective in it?

The holy trinity of recruiting, straight from the LinkedIn Recruiter screen - the $10,000-a-year tool every recruiter uses to find all the world's talent in one place.

Marli's makeover

Title: an urban education policy MA (econ undergrad at Warwick) aiming for education consulting - with a great photo, a great banner, and a headline that didn't say any of that. The headline is capped at 220 characters, so it's the hardest section to game and the one LinkedIn's algorithm trusts most. Changing careers and don't want to overclaim? Aspiring education consultant, Seeking education consulting roles, Exploring education consulting opportunities - all honest, all searchable.

Location: Marli's profile said Bermuda. Beautiful - but she's exploring more broadly. Open doors, don't close them: Open to Work lets you list up to 5 job titles and 5 locations (Bermuda, Providence, New York...) and get filtered in for all of them.

Skills: cross-functional collaboration, project management, strategic planning - Marli has done all of them. She just wasn't getting credit. And the section recruiters trust isn't Skills (anyone can dump keywords there), it's Experience: show the skill inside the work where you used it to drive real results.

🕵️Stealth mode. Open to Work isn't just the green badge. The recruiters only setting tells the recruiters of the world you're in the game without outing you to your current boss or colleagues. Best of both worlds - turn it on today, wherever you are in your journey.
⚠️The trap: "Rewrite my experience section to include those skills." It's what every TikTok career guru says - and it's how you end up in an interview with a partner at the firm asking about experiences you never had. We call that a hallucination. Your future boss calls it a lie, and we bosses still try not to hire liars, even when AI did the lying. There's exactly one world-class expert on your story: the person in the mirror. Get credit for your skills in your own words.
Marli asked
Should my LinkedIn experience be different from my CV? Nope - a CV that reads differently from the profile is a red flag ("is this even the same candidate?"). Paste the bullet points you've already sweated over straight into LinkedIn. And here's why it matters: your CV gets seen by recruiters maybe 5 to 15 times in two years at Brown. About 10 million recruiters run roughly 10 searches a day on LinkedIn, and every search scans every profile - call it 100 million chances a day for your bullets to get you found. Bullets sitting on your hard drive earn you zero credit.
Victor asked
LinkedIn is adding semantic AI search for recruiters - does that change the game? You're right, and it's live now: instead of typing keywords and filters, recruiters can upload a job description and get the best-matched candidates automatically. But that matching is driven by the same inputs - so the play is unchanged: start from a specific JD and reverse engineer your profile to match it. Want to see what's happening behind the curtain? LinkedIn's press room explains tools like Hiring Assistant exactly as recruiters see them.
Jenny asked
I'm a history student and I don't have a LinkedIn profile yet. Do I need one? You don't have to make it the most important thing in your life - but build a basic one: literally your resume, online, done. It's not just about recruiters finding you. When an alum or a hiring manager Googles you, your LinkedIn is the first result. Own that first spot and tell your own story, instead of letting the internet tell it for you.

Enter the LinkedIn gauntlet

  1. Go to Jobs on LinkedIn, pull up a role you want (Marli's was an education role - even one back in the UK counts), and grab the whole description, top to bottom.
  2. Run Prompt 1 to distill the ten keywords that actually matter. AI does this better than any human - that's AI as a complement.
  3. On your own profile, click the three dots > Save to PDF, then run Prompt 2 to see the truth inside the black box.
  4. If you've done it, get credit for it: add those keywords to your Experience section, in your own words. If you haven't, now you know what to build at Brown.
  5. Targeting two roles at once? Prompt 3 finds the Venn-diagram overlap so one profile speaks to both.
PROMPT 1Decode the job description
What are the 10 most important keywords in this job description? [paste the job description]

Individualized roadmaps, higher learning, standardized tests, and 40 other things - AI pushes the noise aside and hands you the signal.

PROMPT 2The moment of truth · Marli "prepared herself" for this one
Which of those key skills am I missing? [upload your own LinkedIn profile PDF]

We love to curse the AI for crushing our hopes and dreams. Nine times out of ten, the one cheating us is ourselves - the skills are real, the credit just isn't on the profile yet.

PROMPT 3One profile, two target roles · Arman's question
What are the 10 most important keywords in common between [education consulting] and [project management] jobs?

Jobs you think of as totally different usually draw from the same universal set of skills. Build your experience section from the overlap and you get the best of both worlds.

PROMPT 4Your own job-hunting agent · Katja's question
Run a daily search across the internet for the best jobs for someone interested in [urban education policy] in [the Northeast], and bring me only the newest, freshest postings each day.

Turn on your AI's agentic / scheduled features for this one. Applying in the first 24 to 72 hours beats applying to a three-month-old posting every single time - recruiters are far more excited about candidates at that stage.

Katja asked
I keep seeing the same jobs repeat in my alerts. What's the best way to search? Welcome to ghost jobs, the bane of our existence (the good news: several states now have laws cracking down on them). Protect yourself two ways: look for the little shield icon on the posting and check when the poster joined LinkedIn, so you know it's not a fly-by-night operation. And look for the green "actively reviewing applicants" signal, which means a real human inside the company is looking - not just stacking resumes for a hire three years from now. Then go on offense with Prompt 4.
📚Marli's homework (the most important homework of her life): get credit for those skills, in her own words, in her Experience section. You came to Brown to get access to the best opportunities in the world - so the work that gets you found for them is the most important work there is. Everyone else: same assignment. 😉
3Get Relationships

Relationships matter - now, more than ever

Pop quiz recap

Three equally strong candidates, one interview slot. Who gets it?

C) The referral - every time. Morgan Mitchell took us straight back to Human Nature 101: a referred candidate is a known entity with someone vouching for them. Apply online and you're a stranger, and we humans have a lousy track record with strangers.

Back in 2016, referred candidates were about 10x more likely to be hired than online applicants. Morgan guessed the gap might be closing. My read in 2026: it's gone up, up, up - more online applications than ever, more of them AI-generated and hallucinated, trust in strangers at an all-time low, and fewer people brave enough to ask for a referral. Be one of the brave few and you have a 20x edge in one of the biggest decisions of your life.

10xthe referral advantage back in 2016
20xmy estimate for today, as applications pile up and referrals get rarer

Arman's referral, from scratch

A PRIME student (Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship, School of Engineering) who'd love to work at Google someday - and doesn't know anyone there. Perfect. As someone who got into Google by referral (two or three of them, to be safe), here's how we built one out of thin air.

Google's LinkedIn People tab is a directory of 300,000 Googlers more detailed than the one on Google's own servers. Filter for Brown and 2nd-degree and suddenly you're looking at your tribe - like Irina, a Gen AI product manager and proud Brown alum. Same place and same role don't make someone trust you. Same school does.

Then the hard road, which is the one that works: a warm intro through a mutual connection (Jyoti or Alicia), and a conversation that is not an elevator pitch. How do you know Alicia? How did you go from Brown to Google? What do you wish you'd known in my shoes? Alums learned it the hard way and love to pay it forward.

🍀Create your own luck. When you reach out to Irina on your own, you're not waiting on the universe - you're making it happen. That was Arman's final answer, and it's the most important lesson of the whole hour.
Makanoon asked
Any thoughts on getting an MBA in the AI era? I went to business school with a very specific goal: alums at Apple and Google had told me the roles I wanted ran straight through an MBA, so the path was clear. But I've seen too many people get one because they weren't sure what else to do - the way people once went to law school to fill time. It's too expensive, and the opportunity cost is too big, to hope and pray. Get the MBA only if the jobs attached to it are exactly the jobs you want - and the way to find out is to talk to the insiders today, before you take the plunge.

Get a referral at any organization in the world

  1. Find the company's page on LinkedIn (Google, the UN, an NGO - whatever lights you up) and open the People tab: the complete directory of everyone inside.
  2. Filter by school = Brown University, and by 2nd-degree connections. Now you're looking at insiders who are already your people.
  3. Don't message cold - Googlers' inboxes are overflowing. Click Mutual connections and ask for the intro. Every time you take the easy road you cut your odds; every time you take the hard road you multiply them.
  4. In the conversation, ask juicy questions and skip the pitch. Then, as she's heading to Sundar's all-hands, plant the seed with the ultimate question below.
  5. Because she brought up referrals, it's easy for her to say "send me your resume." Referral bonus for her, interview for you.
THE ULTIMATE QUESTIONPlant the seed that grows into a referral
Irina, this has been awesome - I know you've got to run. If I could ask for one last piece of advice: if you were back at Brown in my shoes, trying to break into [Google] all over again, knowing what you know now, what would you be doing to get your best shot at an opportunity?

Deeply human, because she's traveled this exact road. Nine times out of ten the answer is "I got referred. Half the company got referred. Sundar got referred." And now she's the one who said it.

BONUSStill want to go direct? Crack the email
What is the most common email format for employees at [Google]?

Same trick as Step 1 - because even Googlers check email far more than LinkedIn. But a mutual connection beats a cold email every time.

🎁Arman's double offer: a copy of the book, and if I can ever introduce you to anyone at Google, just say the word. Bravery is the number one thing we're all looking for these days - and you showed it.
The deck

All 20 slides

Tap any slide to flip through full-size.

⬇ Download the PDF
For you, with love

3 big bonuses - all free, Bears 🎁

Courtesy of Caitlin, Komal and your Center for Master's Student Excellence. (Kevin, Marli and Arman: send me a message on LinkedIn - I'm the rare user who always answers - and your copy of the book heads straight to Providence.)

Bonus 1

Connect with me

A question tomorrow morning, a year from now, or the two I didn't get to today? Send a request with a little note. Like Caitlin and Komal, I want to be in your corner of the ring.

Connect on LinkedIn
thejobinsiders.com/connect
Bonus 2

Get a free profile makeover

Just like the one we did with Marli - from the guy who led LinkedIn's education team. Straight from a LinkedIn insider.

Get my free makeover
thejobinsiders.com/profile
ONE MORE THING ⚡
Bonus 3

CareerBot 3000

My own AI career concierge. Lead with your values (say, leaving the planet better than you found it, with time to enjoy it), add your strengths, and it maps the whole path: CMO at a B Corp in Boston, the Warby Parkers and Patagonias to target, the keywords to stand out, even how to find the Brown alums inside. Not just any role - the one that lets you do the best work of your life.

Meet CareerBot 3000
Free forever
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."
Steve Jobs

In the summer of 2011 I was a lucky kindergarten teacher from Brooklyn interning at Apple - and it turned out to be the last summer Steve Jobs ever worked there, and the last event he ever gave. As sick and frail as he was, the room gasped when he walked out, and he still powered through to his signature flourish: one more thing. Fifteen years later I can't end a session without one either. So don't come to Brown just for the degree, or even just for the job. Come out with a clear ikigai, a profile that gets you found, and a tribe of Bears who'll vouch for you - and go make your dent in the universe. 🙌

So much love to Caitlin for hosting so beautifully, to Komal for making it all possible, and to Kevin, Marli and Arman for sharing so generously. Ever True - Go Bears! 🤎❤️

Jeremy