• In 2023, I graduated into a volatile job market, but thankfully, I landed a job.
• I was living in New York, with an inordinately high cost of living, which made staying untenable.
• Moving to Texas, with its much lower cost of living, allowed me to succeed.

After graduating with a bachelor's in computer science in 2023, a software company offered me an exciting job that paid $60,000 a year.

The catch? I had to move away from home.

I had grown up on Long Island all my life, but the company didn't have an office within commuting distance of my parents' house. Moving felt daunting. Moving across the country? Even more so.

But I felt like I had no choice because of the difficult job market and the rising costs in New York, so I packed up and moved to Texas.

The East Coast was nearly impossible to afford

I did the math. The average rent for an apartment in most East Coast states is $2,000 to $3,000 a month.

Over the course of a year, on average, that would be $30,000. This was half of my annual income — before accounting for any other expenses.

New York State income taxes are also high, plus there's federal tax on top. Already, with back-of-the-napkin math, I found that I would be left with less than half of my annual salary before accounting for food, insurance premiums, utilities, and rainy-day savings.

After all that, there would be next to nothing left for student loan repayments, and I wouldn't be able to save any money to eventually buy a house.

Texas was the much cheaper option

Researching my options, I learned the company had an office in San Antonio. As I researched this unfamiliar city, what I found astounded me.

Even in a large city like San Antonio, rent averages $1,000 to $1,500 a month. Texas also has no state income tax.

I would have significantly more of my annual income to spend and save if I lived in Texas with the same job.

I decided to move across the country to Texas

Though the numbers were promising, I had never been south of Virginia until my move. I had no clue what San Antonio was like and had no family or friends there for support.

I found my apartment in this new, unfamiliar city remotely. I scanned Google Maps. I made a list of apartments with ideal locations and read their tenants' reviews. I focused on ones with two to four stars to avoid being misled.

As part of my research, I looked at crime statistics. I was happy to see it was very low. I then narrowed my commute down to five minutes.

I'm financially comfortable in Texas

After the move, I paid about $1,250 a month for a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment with an in-home washer & dryer, community gym, and pool.

There is a rule in personal finance called the 50/30/20 rule. Ideally, you should spend 50% on needs, 30% on wants, and save 20% of what you earn. Living in Texas, I easily spent less than 50% on needs and saved more than 40% of what I earned.

All of that would not have been possible on the East Coast at my entry-level, new-grad salary.

Lastly, home prices in Texas are much lower, so my goal of homeownership finally felt achievable.

I made my cross-country move work for me

As a new graduate, I faced a market with low salary expectations, frequent mass layoffs, and high job volatility.

I made it work by moving away from a state with a high cost of living to one offering a 50% discount on life.

New graduates and early professionals may find success doing the same.

• As a professor at Harvard, I encourage my students to use AI on every assignment.
• My students can use AI as a research tool and editor, but AI cannot do the thinking for them.
• I teach my students how to use AI to make better arguments, and that's where the use should stop.

I still remember the November when ChatGPT came out, and the exam period that followed.

As a professor at Harvard, I had B+ writers submitting essays with em dashes and Oxford commas, as if they had just signed with Penguin. Just as their writing magically improved, their voices began to blur into what we now call "AI slop."

Yet, as one of the earliest victims of the AI slop tsunami, I refuse to give in to the Luddism that led institutions to shut the door on AI entirely.

Instead, I've chosen to invite AI into every corner of my classroom because anything less will soon feel like a dereliction of duty.

I think Gen Z needs to be taught to use AI responsibly

Every generation struggles with entering the workforce, but few have had it as hard as my Gen Z students. Reading the news, you would think their struggles boil down to a mixture between laziness and entitlement, forgetting that we have been blaming the youth for all that ails society since Aristotle.

In reality, they're struggling because we're asking them to excel at two things that are foreign to them at once.

Not only are they stepping into institutions without answer guides or gradebooks, but they're doing so at a time when the tools no one is teaching them are redefining how the work itself gets done.

When AI is taking over the workplace, you don't respond by pretending the tools don't exist. You respond by teaching people how to use them well.

I now ask students to use AI in every assignment

The most important lesson I teach my undergrads is the same one I teach in my executive education classes: Use AI responsibly, with a personal growth mindset, not an output-oriented one.

I begin by asking my students not to lie to themselves about the kind of AI user they are becoming.

Are they centaurs, with half their essays spliced from ChatGPT, or cyborgs, with AI agents writing their emails while they sleep and automatically reviewing their Uber Eats orders?

Perhaps they're artisans, clinging harder and harder to what little humanity is left in us?

Whichever route they choose, the practice of using AI for growth couldn't be simpler.

There are some ground rules they have to follow

We begin by acknowledging one of AI's greatest strengths: its ability to quickly synthesize across large bodies of knowledge and connect ideas across disparate silos. Students get comfortable with ChatGPT's deep research, Perplexity's searches across academic journals, and Gemini's ability to poke holes in their arguments before typing a single word.

Should they find particularly challenging pieces, as they often do in my economics classes, they are allowed to use AI to help them "explain it like I'm five" and apply the insights directly, instead of getting a Ph.D. to understand what they found.

But when it comes to drafting the arguments themselves, my number one rule is that we put AI on pause. The goal is to capture their thinking in its rawest form and to give their thoughts a function before they obtain a form, even if it means leaning on voice notes to move our arguments along.

Only once my students know what they want to say, does AI return to help them, this time as an editor and a critic.

I ask students to submit their argument chains to AI so it can identify gaps, suggest further reading, and help finish concepts that were pulled from the oven a bit too soon.

This way, the argument improves, but the thinking remains theirs.

Where I draw the line

Even in a classroom where AI is as fully integrated as mine, this is where the boundary must lie. AI cannot do the thinking for us, and as teachers, we must help students avoid the temptation.

When students feel pressured to achieve perfection, the temptation to hand over the entire process to AI can become too strong to resist.

As I reflect on the essays I received now and those of December 2022, the lesson couldn't be clearer.

The best students aren't those who avoid using AI. Instead, they're the ones who know when and where to stop using it.

• I studied at universities in both the US and China, first in 2015 and again in 2025.
• Experiencing Chinese higher education at two different times showed me how different the system is.
• The differences in cost, campus culture, and career pathways made me rethink American universities.

I've done something quite rare: I'm an American who attended college in both the US and China.

I completed my undergraduate degree in political science at a state university in New York and studied abroad in Wuhan, China, during the summer of 2015. Ten years later, in 2025, I returned to Shijiazhuang, China, while completing my second graduate degree in global health, interning at a medical university.

Experiencing Chinese universities at two distinct points in my life, a decade apart, gave me a rare view of how the system operates and how it has evolved.

I didn't meet any Americans studying in China most recently

During my first trip, I was in a group of about 30 American college students. The second time, I was the only person from my cohort to go.

Since the pandemic, the number of US students in China has dropped, according to NPR. In fact, I didn't meet a single American in the three months I was in the country most recently.

Both times, I met lots of African students, though. They were heavily invested in and integrated into the Chinese learning and working systems.

I've noticed China sets the international students I met up for success

Many of the international students I talked to in the US told me how hard it was to integrate and find a pathway to work after school in New York.

In China, I noticed there's a pathway for international students who want to stay, particularly those who have developed strong Mandarin skills.

The Chinese government and universities are actively trying to entice international students to come to the country, while also investing in ways to retain graduates.

Campus life looks very different from what I experienced in the US

The internet firewall in China can make research difficult, and I've seen doctors smoking in classrooms between lectures.

Student life also reflects a different set of norms. There is low tolerance for drugs and alcohol on many Chinese campuses. After class, I saw friends playing badminton rather than drinking beer.

Technology and security are also visible on campus. Students on the campuses I studied entered by scanning their faces and were tracked by cameras.

Politics also felt more openly present in academic life. Most of the professors and physicians I worked with were active members of the Communist Party and often wore pins on their lapels to signify it.

As one local friend put it, "having one state party means policies don't change every four years," which, in their view, can create a certain level of stability for universities.

Chinese universities are far cheaper and more specialized

The two universities I studied at in China didn't have the fancy sports facilities most American colleges do, but many students I met weren't going into debt to study either.

Tuition in China is subsidized by the government, especially at public universities. That means it's relatively affordable compared with many Western countries.

Housing and food costs are also inexpensive in my experience. I was eating a healthy lunch on campus for $1 a day. My American campus used to sell a single banana for $1.05 in 2015.

I also spent a year taking general courses in America. While I loved taking a class on Bollywood as a political science major, the specialization offered by many Chinese universities helped better prepare me for the real world. I also saved money by not taking general courses while in China.

Studying in both systems changed how I think about education

I didn't just earn my degrees in multiple countries; I learned about the culture of education. I learned how the government impacts who can study what and if they will be successful.

I'll always be partial to the American scholastic mentality of questioning everything and forming opinions, rather than the rote memorization I saw in China, but I'd prefer not to be launched into the working world with so much student loan debt.

I hope more Americans can form their own opinions of China's educational system, which has rapidly evolved and will only continue to grow in its unique way.