Don't Ignore Office Hours

When was the last time you attended your prof's office hours?

I bet it was a long time ago. Or never. (Ask me how I know!)

Sure, before LLMs, students would sometimes come to profs' office hours for shallow reasons -- to debug code together, or to clarify something from the textbook. Now, such things are handled perfectly by an LLM, and you can keep asking follow-up questions until the context window gets full (humans sometimes have slightly lower tolerance for this).

I keep saying -- LLMs are great, and they replace a human instructor in many, many cases. But when it comes to deep, reflective questions, they'll keep telling you the "averaged" narrative, over and over again.

To get unique points of view, we need to speak with other human beings.

But how do you find unique, interesting people to speak with? There are ways, but they all require extra effort: events, networking, asking for warm introductions... Getting coffee chats with original thinkers (and you want to speak with those people) is very hard.

If you're a student, you have a huge unfair advantage -- professors' office hours. Don't come to argue about your grades (who cares about grades). Come to speak with your prof.

Ask reflective questions.

What is on your mind right now? Maybe you're worried about finding a job. So, ask: "How did you find your first job?" Of course, it was before the AI revolution, but we know that genuine, unique human stories will survive a revolution (read "Doctor Zhivago" if you haven't yet).

A little-known fact: you don't actually need to be in the prof's class to join their office hours. Just figure out the time, show up, and introduce yourself. The prof will never kick you out -- they'll be flattered that you showed up and want to talk.

P.S. If you recently graduated, you can still get away with this for a while :-)