Elevating Individuals Through Mentorship
Let's Talk
Gen Z is often labeled as the hyper-connected, digital-native generation, but what if they are actually the most tired of the online world? In this illuminating conversation, we sit down with Scott Seibel, a self-funding junior at CU Boulder, who offers a powerful and unique lens into collegiate life, fierce motivation, and the complex relationship students have with technology. Scott shares his generation’s growing desire to disconnect from screens for more meaningful, interpersonal connections, even while grappling with a crucial challenge: the confusing, “wishy-washy” policy on Artificial Intelligence (AI) on campus. As universities struggle to define where AI belongs—a helpful tool or grounds for plagiarism—students are left in fear, knowing they must use it to keep pace but risking failure if they do. Discover why this fiscally responsible student believes AI should be a tool for experienced professionals, not a crutch for those just starting out, and how this digital dilemma is shaping the next generation of leaders.
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We have a wonderful guest by the name of Scott Seibel. Scott and we were introduced when I went out to the great state of Colorado. I had a chance to not only get some work done out there, but also explore some of the beautiful areas just outside of CU Boulder, which is where Scott is a junior at the moment, and we also got a chance because my seventeen year old helped me on this trip and we went touring and so I met Scott because he was our tour guide. We had an amazing time and I was absolutely amazed with him and his story, so we decided to have Scott join us. Welcome Scott, it’s so good to see you.
So glad to see you, I hope you guys had a best time on tour. I was really excited. It was honestly one of my better tours. I’m glad that you guys were on that one, it was really fun.
Well, you nailed it, that’s for sure. Now, let me ask, since you guys told us that you have 320-some-odd days of sunshine. Is it a sunny day out there?
Today is not. Today is really cloudy. We got like no snow this year and so I’ll take the rain right now and help with the fires definitely, but I also really love the rain, I’m from just South of Seattle.
Let’s talk about this because I do think that you would be somebody that likes rain because you also mentioned that you were a mermaid on our tour. I was like, “Wait a minute, he’s saying that he’s a mermaid.” I immediately honed in on that because my group of college girlfriends and I, over time, we’ve called ourselves a lot of different things, but somehow we ended up on the term that we’re the mermaids. When I heard you are a mermaid, I was like, “Could it be? I met another one.” Tell us a little bit about the mermaid comment.
I’ve been a swimmer my entire life and since I got to see you like it’s way more whimsical to say, “I’m going to go play mermaids,” than it is to say, “I’m going to go swim a bunch of laps.” I will just tell my friends, “Well, yeah, no, I’m going to go play mermaids right now.” Everyone understands what that means now, where it’s just me going to the pool, it’s just me going to do like a swim workout.
I spent so much of my time around a pool and that doesn’t really even feel like I’m doing swimming and just having this in the laps, it just feels like I’m having a good time, just feels like I’m getting to be free for like an hour at a time. It’s really just more like playing mermaids than it is actually doing the workout which is really fun and it’s really funny because on every single tour I go, “I’m the founder and only member of the mermaid club here at CU Boulder.” It’s actually a little bit of a lie because you have to have two people to have a club.
I can’t be the only person in the mermaid club and so I keep telling every single person on tour, “Applications are open and if you’d like to join the process is pretty rigorous,” no one’s joined. It’s really just me alone playing mermaids which is to me it’s really funny and just it makes people laugh and it starts especially on tour it starts off really nice and lets everybody loosen up a little bit because some people get really nervous.
I was going to say we can hope that maybe if somebody’s reading at CU Boulder, they will apply to become a mermaid and then you will be an official club. Now I got to ask, you could sweeten the pot because you have an indoor pool lovely or things but you have one of the only buffalo shaped head outdoor pools and I think it’s the only one where you said the hoof is a hot tub. You blew me with that.
It’s got like jets in it, it’s super fun. I had one person on tour, we were standing outside the buffalo shaped pool and they’re like, “Okay, so if I jump from here into the pool do I automatically get into the mermaid club?” I went, “No, because it’s the biggest safety concern I’ve ever seen in my life, but if you do it that would be really cool.” I’ve added a few things where I’m like, “It’s a great place to come out and like fix your tan line,” I know that’s what I’m doing right now when I go swimming at the buff pool because it’s outside.
I’ve only started going to the buff pool in 2026. I didn’t used to swim at the buffalo shaped pool because I was like, “I’m not one of those people, like I’m going to go outside in my speedo and swim in front of everybody.” I stopped caring because I was like, “It’s sunny outside and I want to swim in the buffalo shaped pool,” no one else in the morning ever goes and swims in it because the buffalo shaped pool is freezing cold.
All of the pools are supposed to be kept at the same temperature but because this pool is outside, it takes way more to heat it. I know way too much about pool heating because it’s part of my other job that I’ve got. I don’t know if their system’s beefy enough to be heating the outdoor pool and so the outdoor pool is like five degrees cooler than the indoor pools are. In the pool world, that’s considered like ice. It’s freezing cold. If it were just a regular day, I would totally go out there and just enjoy it, but today, it’s way too cold to even be in the pool because there’s no sunshine.
I would figure you guys have a pretty significant speaking of buff, you have a pretty buff LEED system, and that’s the business school. It’s the Leeds Business School. You would think that all of the LEED folks they could figure out a way to get that outdoor pool warmed up in an environmentally favorable manner. That could be something that the university could work on.
I think our engineers could totally get on that somehow.
I think that as the president of the mermaid club, you should probably champion that. That’s to add on to your list. You mentioned you have other jobs. Not only are you the sole member of the non-club, the mermaid club, however you are a junior at CU Boulder. You are in Political Science, so this is under the college of Arts and Letters, is that right?
Arts and Science.
You also are studying Secondary Education, because you did mention that maybe at some point in your life you might come back and be a teacher. Although I think you are already teaching with everything you do.
I do a lot when it comes to working with kids but I think in my younger years post grad, I don’t think the first thing I want to do is go teaching and be a teacher. I have all of my favorite teachers in my high school career, which is where I’d want to go, all explored and then came back and then they were experts in their field. Similar like professors, they go out they do a bunch of research they become experts in their field and then they come back and they start teaching. That’s what I want to do. The problem is that whole post grad part, there’s so many options I just don’t know what I’m going to do.
You’re very plugged in and so I’ll share with the audience when you were taking us around for the tour, you are an RA, which I automatically think of people in a different sense when they’re an RA because you’ve got to herd the cats, you’ve got to manage to a lot of people’s problems. This is how you get a management degree without getting a management degree in a university. You become an RA.
You’re an RA you’re also a CA, but you’re a CA to the second power because you’re a CA classroom assistant for the President’s Leadership Class and you’re a CA community assistant for what you call the Quad, and then you’re also an ambassador, I called you tour guide but you’re an ambassador for CU and that is how I learned all of this.
On top of the fact that even though you’re in the great state of Colorado and you mentioned you’re tied to Washington but that’s where you hail from, somehow you manage in this long distance situation to be the aquatic manager and head swim coach for the Fairwood Golf and Country Club. Kudos for that. I know you’re thinking about postgrad and I want to go there in a minute but you still got another year. How is it that you have so many jobs on campus and don’t you take a pretty heavy load too?
Yeah, this is the first semester I’m not taking the maximum credit load at CU. I’m only technically taking seventeen credits which is like the mid the mid area. If you add the class that I’m helping teach it’s more like twenty credits but that’s a job so it doesn’t count. The whole situation I think comes from like my mom. I learned how to manage myself because of my mom.
One of the lessons my mom indirectly taught me was how to have a good calendar. You’ve got to have everything labeled out, you’ve got to have everything set in stone and then planned out. I’m not a whimsical person very much, I don’t like to fly by the seat of my pants. I like everything to be scheduled out. That’s great for my week because I can just look at my week at a glance every single week, I know exactly what’s going to happen.
Have a good calendar—you need everything labeled, clearly laid out, and fully planned in advance. Share on XIt’s terrible for things like when I want to schedule other things going on in the world. It takes a long time to be like, “Okay, maybe I can move this over, maybe I can do all of this.” I’m also completely funding my college experience by myself. There are two veins that I’m thinking about all of this. Number one need to make sure that my academics are taken care of and that I’m doing as much as I possibly can here. To those who do not know, CU is pretty expensive. As amazing of a university as this is, it is really expensive to be here.
At the same time, I want to take full advantage of that and so I would rather take all the classes I possibly can each and every single semester to learn as much as possible because I’m here. It’s expensive. To be at the maximum credit load it’s only like an extra $500 to add all of those extra classes. Whereas if I were just taking the minimum credit load, I’d be playing all of that money to not be doing the maximum amount allowed.
I’m like, “I’m here, even if it means I have to pay a little bit extra I’m going to take as many classes as I possibly can and learn as much and diversify my portfolio of what I know and my brain and my knowledge.” That’s like vein one. Vein two for all of the jobs that I have is I’ve got to pay for it. My whole thought process is, “if there’s a job on campus I’m going to go try and get it because it’s going to help pay for my school.”
My RA position pays for my housing and my food. That’s like $20,000 right off of the bat right there that I don’t have to worry about. I don’t have to pay a monthly rent which a lot of students here struggle with and some people get help from their parents. Although my parents are in the corner supporting me and they love me and they’re super proud of me, they can’t help financially support me. They couldn’t send over $2,000 a month for rent because that’s just not reasonable for them. From the get-go, I had to figure out how to pay for housing.
That was one of the reasons I did choose CU is because becoming an RA had such great perks associated with it. Now most universities those RA positions do have something similar to that but CU’s worked out really well because this is just the school that I really wanted to go to. The fact that they had all these programs for ras was super helpful.
You can’t be an RA as a freshman. You came on campus and then you could apply as a sophomore?
The window for applying for the RA position here at CU is like two weeks at the beginning of the first month of school. If you don’t do it those first two weeks, that opportunity’s gone until next year. I was really nervous about that at first because I was like, “I need this job.” It was a decision that I made with my parents where it’s like, “I will go to CU for a year and I will figure out how it works and if I can’t become an RA I can’t afford to go to this school anymore.”
Did you have a backup plan?
I really didn’t. I was like, “I’m going to figure this out.” The first week I was here, I went to every single event that was held within my building area so that I could get to know all of the ras and I could get to know the hall director of the department where I was living so that I could get to know them better, get to know what the job was going to be like, get to know what the interview was going to be like. It’s really funny because that first week that I was getting to know all of these people, I went into it being like, “I need this for me. This is for me.” I got to know all of these people and I just genuinely enjoyed all of the time that I was spending with them.
I joined the community council my first year I was here. I joined the community council which is like the, “Let’s plan events for the building, let’s have a pizza party, let’s watch the Super Bowl together.” ras plan events but also students can plan events if they want to as well. I joined that and that is what I found out later one of the top things that the people hiring ras are looking for. It’s like, “Were you on community council?”
It’s not a really hard job but it shows you know how to use all of the systems in the background, you know how to work with the department and you’re getting to know how to work with the other people in the building. Again, it’s probably one of the easiest little clubs that I was a part of but it was really great to be a part of that because it helped transform what the rest of my experience would be like.
At that point in time, when you’ve just started college, something that I learned pretty quickly is everything you did in high school becomes null and void. No one really cares anymore what your high school resume looks like. The second you get to college you’ve got to have college things on your resume.
Other people join fraternities. Other people do a bunch of clubs. Other people start their own business. I walked into CU and I was like, “I have no idea what I want to do.” I joined CU admitted into the President’s Leadership Class, which I tend to just call PLC. That was really great because it’s a scholarship program but I had no idea really what it was. Joining Coco, which was the community council and getting involved with other aspects of the university was really important to me because I was like, “Okay, well, I’ve got to figure out how to be an RA, I’ve got to figure out some other on campus jobs.”
So far, it’s worked out pretty well. I I do really like being an RA because I get to like connect with a bunch of people. Next year, they’re changing everything about being an RA. My whole job next year is just to plan events just to connect with students. I don’t have to do any of the staying up late. I was on call last night. I have my on call phone. It’s a little hard to see my on call phone right here.
Is that really a flip phone?
It really is a flip phone. A real flip phone.
You are so old school. I love it.
It can be anything from, “I need a temp key,” to “I’m having a medical emergency,” to “I’m worried about my roommate,” and everything in between they can call the ras and then we’ll go do a spot check on them, we can either solve the problem with the students themselves, we can check in on the student, but anytime it gets past a certain point, then we just call the police or we call the residential security officers and they can come help the students which is really great. Next year, I won’t have to do that at all. This is one burden I will not have to carry. It’s probably the hardest part about the job and so I’m really excited about that.
You’re like a doctor you’re on call 24/7 basically.
Basically.
Let me go back to something that I think is really important. First of all, kudos to your mom for teaching you about time management and getting you on a calendar system that you can appreciate. I love the fact that you give a nod to time management being one of the key ways that you’re able to manage multiple jobs and take more than a full credit load as a student.
The other thing that you said that I found really important is this whole you just showed up early and often. Now you had a mission which is the money’s going to run out and I’m not going to be able to stay here if I don’t figure this out in my first year. You had a high motivating factor and you ended up going out there and networking.
Scott, you’re like a really gregarious guy. This is why you’re an ambassador. Another thing that you said very important was, “Nobody cares about your high school resume when you come to college.” For people who may be a little shy, not as outgoing, they probably had a really great resume in high school in order to get into a college like CU Boulder. What would you say to them? You’re probably an RA to many of them. What would you say to them as far as, “This is what you should do,” or “This is how you overcome that,” in order to go out and be involved.
There’s a few different things I could do. I had a family member who was about to start college like this and so I had a little chat with them and to be like, “Okay, the hardest part about your first year experience, and you can disagree with me until you finished your first year, but the hardest part is going to be the first week that you’re there. You do not get to don’t sleep in don’t go to bed early you’re going to want to be out getting to know everybody getting to know everybody on your floor, getting to know everybody around, joining different clubs and you like just have to join the club for the week.” That first week to me and as an RA now that I’ve seen it multiple years in a row, I’ve almost like decided for myself that that is the right answer.
The hardest part of your first year of college is the first week you’re there. Share on XThat first week is so incredibly important on just meeting people. That could be meeting people on your floor to meeting the president of the university to meeting your future job to meeting the lettuce eating club founder. You’re just going out that first week and just to go explore. Especially a campus like CU, go take your friends hiking, there’s so many hiking opportunities. Go get like dinner every night with a new person or the same people but really like start making connections with people.
After that first week is over, you’ve got school and so everybody’s priorities are going to shift. You’ve got one week of pure socialization where you can just go out, just explore. The world expects nothing of you during that first week of college and what’s really nice about being a college student is the world really is just like, “You’re in college. We don’t really expect a lot with you,” which is why I love everything that I’ve been doing because everyone’s like, “Wait, aren’t you like super busy. Don’t you have anything?” I was like, “Yeah, and I’m proving myself to nobody and now I’m blowing everybody’s socks off.” I’ll take the ego boost, for sure.
I never heard of it described that way but you’re absolutely right. It’s almost like you get a little bit of a buy because you’re in this purgatory. You’re in postsecondary. You haven’t moved into the official real world of career yet. I like that outlook.
After that first week is over, everyone’s working on classes and really getting vested in the clubs that they’ve decided to join and they’ve they’re starting to settle. That first semester, once people start to settle, I like to say their relationships turn into like temporary concrete. You don’t budge. After that first semester, you make friends that first week and then that’s how it sticks for the rest of that first semester.
Now it is super common and again, I’ve seen this every year plus I experienced it myself, the end of that first semester or the beginning of that second semester is where a lot of friendships change. People are like, “You weren’t really the people I thought I wanted to be with,” or “I think I’ve changed a lot in this first semester and I don’t think that my friends kept up with me,” or “These people are my people. I don’t have any other people and I don’t want any other people.” By the end of that first semester in the beginning of that second semester is when those relationships really start to they either start to crumble or they start to break and you start to rebuild them.
That’s when people start going to dinner less with each other or they start bringing their significant others to dinner with you. My first friend group I had on campus were just the people that lived on my floor. They were so great and so kind and I had the best memories with them. I started to meet other people and more highly motivated people.
I don’t necessarily need to be surrounded by highly motivated people all of the time but it’s great when my friends can inspire me by how motivated they are and then I want to go be motivated too. It’s like a little bit of a ripple effect and it’s pretty helpful if I do want to go out and do something like, “Okay, if they’re doing this, then I can definitely just do this.”
You so you boost your frequency. If you’re thinking that you need a little inspiration, you just find a frequency that’s going to get you there. Can I ask you, not swaying on either side, but I’m just curious because although you have a flip phone so you are so old school, but you probably have a smartphone too.
I’ve got two phones.
I know. I was like, “Scott’s got to carry around two phones, that is not good.” In your mind, the difference between online and in person as far as how to connect because both are available to students on campus. What about this online world versus the in person world? What would you like to say about that?
I’m definitely noticing like a tonal shift just on campus and with other people that I know and honestly personally as well. We’re all tired of the online world. It’s all we know. The people before us have built up such a great online world and such a great platform and when you think about us as kids as much younger people, we were honestly like the test subjects for all of the online platforms. We were the people trying it all out.
It’s not that we were the first generation to try everything out but we got the more fine-tuned experience before it blew up to what this like AI area is going to be with like Gen Alpha and like what they’re experiencing. We experienced like, “Okay, now everyone’s going to start having flat screen tvs in their home and they’re going to be big or they’re going to be nicer.”
I grew up with everyone carrying around a smartphone. Not a flip phone, not a brick phone, not a car phone but a smartphone. We still had a house phone but by the time that I was getting into middle school, the house phone was no longer used. Everyone had the smartphone. My job was to have the house phone if ever something was going wrong. I wasn’t allowed to have a phone so I had the house phone. We’ve got technology. We were the first ipad kids. I got a leappad or like a DS but then other people were either getting ipads, getting phones. To make a really long story long, a lot of us here the smartphone is and the technology is so ingrained into us that what we all crave a lot more is the escape from it. What’s frustrating for some people is they don’t know that that’s what they want.
I’ve got some people where it’s like they’re going to spend the summer with like little to no technology. They’re really nervous about it. I used to be a summer camp kid and I used to be a camp counselor. My favorite part of the year was when I got to literally turn my phone off and had no technology and it’s me and all of the trees around me and my arts and crafts station.
I did the arts and crafts station and then the mountain biking station. I start the morning in arts and crafts move over to mountain biking in the afternoon. They tried to go get me to be a lifeguard over there but I didn’t really want to do that. I only did that when they were like a lifeguard was sick. Since I’ve had that experience where I can put all of this stuff away, I’ve honestly craved that experience more than I’ve craved anything else.
When you talk to other people that have similar experiences, that’s what they want most in the world. You find the most people that are most anxious and the most upset and the most irritable are the people that are attached to their technology the most. Especially here in Boulder, we’re a super outdoorsy school. At the same time, we’re digitally up to date.
Congratulations. Hearing what you just said, that might be an a-ha moment for them. “What is Scott saying?” Scott says that actually, him and many in his generation, if he wants to speak on behalf of his friend group, they’re actually excited about disconnecting and getting more real and getting more interpersonal. I think that they would absolutely love to hear that, to be honest with you. Of course, running a mentorship company, I love hearing that.
That being the case, how does that play out in the classroom? Everybody’s trying to move towards AI and we’ve got different universities playing with AI in the classroom and even trying to get AI to bring together groups of people in teamwork type environments for class. How is that playing out for you and what you’re studying? Where are they doing it well and where do you feel like they’re missing the mark?
It’s really hard, because nobody really knows. I use AI, but I try not to use it as much as other people do. It’s one of those things where it’s like a cookie in the cookie jar. You’ve got to learn when not to use it and also, it’s really nice when you do get to use it. It’s a tool, not a toy. I think it goes into some other things where I was talking about earlier where it’s so easy to use, but it’s also a super slippery slope. If you aren’t careful with it, it’s not going to be helpful. I don’t think AI necessarily belongs in the collegiate level area. At the same time, it is one of the most useful tools that professors in the university and even students have been like, “This has made everything a lot easier.”
For all those people who are designing websites and creating code for stuff and writing papers, it might be super helpful, but it’s only helpful when you already have those skills. You talk to people like in the professional world, I got to talk with some people who like, design websites and design experiences for the state of Colorado. They’re in charge of like, the government experience.
I don’t really know what that means, so that’s why that’s a pretty vague answer. She was talking about the fact where it’s like, “Well, I’ve got 40 years of experience under my belt and now I’ve got this AI assistant who can help me do my job four times faster. Of course I’m going to use it.” you come to students like us, we don’t have 40 years of experience. We don’t even have experience. We’ve got school and we’ve got school experience. AI only started taking off, I would say in universities, my sophomore year is when I noticed a really big change from the first year to the second year.
My freshman year it was here, it was present, but there was barely an AI policy. By my sophomore year, there was a huge AI policy, huge plagiarism things. It’s really hard because it’s like, “Well, you built this tool. Do you want us to use it or not?” the university has a really wishy-washy policy on it where it’s like, “We’re either going to fail you out of the university or we’re going to give you the equivalent of a Nobel Peace Prize. We don’t know.”
To the students, everyone’s living in fear if they use AI, and at the same time, if they don’t use AI, they’ll fall behind because everything’s going so much quicker now. It’s like the issue with social media too. Where if I could unplug and disconnect completely from social media, I would. In this day and age, as a 21-year-old human being with barely an address, where am I supposed to be getting my news?
I don’t subscribe to cable, I don’t have a newspaper. I’ve got to use social media to get news. Some people are like, “You shouldn’t be using social media to get news.” I turn to the charts that are like, well, social media is the world’s most used form of news communication. That’s like a BS answer for all of the people who don’t use it. At the same time, you’ve got all this AI deepfake stuff going on and it’s really hard to be like,
For the people who aren’t in university, we spend so much time in classes deciphering what is and what isn’t AI. We are wrong a lot of the time. I present some of that stuff to like, my parents or some other family members, they can’t tell the difference. Now they’ve got all of their experience where AI is super helpful for them to make this better, and at the same time, they’re the ones most easily tricked by AI.
You’ve got all of us who have no experience in anything and we’re using AI either a lot or not at all to help us progress into the world of what is going to become the world of AI, and now, but no one trusts us to do anything because they all think all we do is use AI. It’s like this weird balance where it’s a little hypocritical and at the same time, totally understandable.
We don’t have a track record and at the same time, I’m not the one on Facebook getting tricked by like, an AI picture or AI videos, which is really hard for a lot of people. It happens in class. I’ve got a foreign policy class where we watch some of these things and my professor literally said, “I will know if you use AI because no one in this room could make something look that good.” it’s really funny. Our professor, after we submitted, we made political cartoons for one of our assignments.
Just as like an icebreaker for the first week of school. Mine was really bad. I am not an artist. I drew it on my note-taking app. I take all of my notes physically, but it’s on an ipad, whereas a lot of people take notes on their computer. Everyone knows how helpful taking notes on computer is versus actually writing it out. At the same time, carrying around a notebook and notepad is a little inconvenient.
I think that was for the audience. I think that was a Scott tip, by the way. That was a tip of the day.
I love having my ipad. I will die on that hill. I did my cartoon and it wasn’t that great, but it was really funny. That was the whole point. Have fun with where our political climate is. We can’t do anything right now. Just have fun with it. Only one person submitted the AI one, but then you saw like 30 comments underneath it being like, “This person used AI.” the professor went, “If anyone uses it, you can just call it out. That’s okay.”
Was that an embarrassment for that person?
My opinion is darn, that might have been embarrassing for you, but you knew the rules. It’s like, “You took a risk. Good job on taking a risk. It was a bad risk. It was a bad bet.” it’s not like I knew that person personally. That professor didn’t fail them. It’s not like they didn’t get credit. They didn’t get a very good grade, and they might have failed that assignment, but they didn’t fail them out of the class.
My other thought process is AI, especially in college, should not be the primary person doing your work for you or should not be the primary thing doing the work because then I go back to the thing I said all the way at the beginning. I’m paying an ungodly amount of money to be here. It’s my job to learn what’s going to happen, not my job to teach the AI how to do my job.
I got to say, Scott, even on the tour, I remember you mentioned that. You’re very fiscally responsible. I think the fact that you have to work for your degree and you know every dollar that’s going in and out makes a big difference on the fact that you take your collegiate career so seriously. You are squeezing every bit out of it.
Okay, to sum up the conversation on tech versus interpersonal, I find it fascinating, the lens in which you see this as a 21-year-old in school. I think it’s very smart. I think that at best it’s confusing or maybe even dangerous. Everybody’s trying to figure it out, whether it’s the university, the student, the parents of the student, the people that are hiring you for the future. I think your lens is a really unique lens. I appreciate you sharing that. The people that are outside the bubble, the people that are outside of school, that you are going to be interviewing with in about a year when you graduate? What do you want them to know about you and or your generation?
I don’t know if this is a pro or con. As of right now, I have the world’s worst work-life balance and I really like it. I love to work. What’s really nice about all of my jobs, I’ve got so many and they’re all sprinkled around everywhere, but I’m really passionate about everything that I’m doing. I’m not doing anything that I wouldn’t sign my life away to a little bit. I really love giving tours, I love being an RA, I love all the classes that I’m taking. I don’t like to waste my time.
That’s where AI is really helpful. I should know how to use that, especially in this day and age. Using AI to help not waste time is really great. I also know how to make things for myself. My favorite thing to do is I grade presentations for people. Some people have figured out how to use AI to make presentations for them, and I can tell. Making a presentation is easy. Making a good presentation is hard. People are trying to make it so much easier, whether it’s Canva making all these like templates for everybody.
AI can be really helpful, and it’s important to know how to use it—especially in today’s world. Using AI to save time and work more efficiently is incredibly valuable. Share on XLet me ask you, what’s the difference? If you can tell and you’re like, “Making a good presentation is hard,” what are the key differentiators for you?
In that specific world, and this is like almost like even more meta than the way that I mean it, but someone else made that for them. Let’s say the template. They made the template for them. If you’re going to use a template and just slap a bunch of words all over it, that what you want to say, and then move on and then give that presentation, that presentation was not customized to you. That presentation had nothing to do with you. Someone else made it, you just copied it. You gave them credit at the end when it said “Made at Slidesgo.” when I’m giving a presentation, I gave a presentation on like, government and healthcare.
Did you solve all the world’s problems in that? If you did, please share it with us right now.
Didn’t solve any of the problems. That goal was to have like a bipartisan view on what’s going on with government, what’s going on with healthcare and how they’re like this or how they’re like that. What was really good about that presentation, number one, I don’t use a template. If I was, I made that template work for me. I changed everything about it to make it fit for me. In the work life, you’ve got a job, you’ve got a job description, you’ve got a job you need to do. I’m going to do it how I’m supposed to be doing it. That might mean there might be a little bit of creative liberty in how that needs to get done.
I always told my mom, “I’m a complainer, I’m not a quitter.” even if you want me to do the dishes, I will do the dishes. I’m going to let you know how upset it makes me and then I’m going to go do it. You’ve got to let me do both if you want it to get done. If you shut me down, if you don’t let me complain, I won’t go do it. Now it doesn’t mean like I’m going to go up to my boss every single day and be like, “I hate my job and I hate you, but I’m going to go do it now.”
That’s not what I mean by that, but it’s just like, you’ve got to emoted a little bit and understand the frustration about it. If there’s any point in time at which I don’t like something about what I’m doing, I track what I don’t like and then I try and make it more efficient. I did that with the RA role. I went and I collected a bunch of data on how many ras, how many students, what buildings they were all in and like the metrics of how that whole situation like worked out.
The Residence Life Housing Department is changing everything about the RA role. Nothing next year will be the same. I touched on that a little bit, but nothing about next year will be similar as it was to this year. A lot of people are nervous about it because we are the largest school to try. The other schools that have tried this system have 500 people living on campus, we’ve got over 7,000. It’s a little bit of a different process.
I wasn’t okay with it at first. I was really upset about it. I took all this data, I reorganized everything and I went, “Okay, this is our current layout.” the whole point of them changing it was to be like, “We want the work to be more equitable.” I called BS on that. I went and took all this data on all these people and I went, “Okay, if we moved 1 RA over to this building and took 2 ras from this building and spread them out in between those two buildings, we’d have the same amount of residents.”
The main problem is people don’t have the same amount of residents. What I mean by that is people over in like Kittredge, which is a little, it’s a beautiful place over in the side of the, the Colorado campus, they’ve got around 19 to 21 residents an RA. That’s a great workload. That’s 19 to 21 people that I’m checking in on, I’m making sure are okay, I’m throwing events for. I’m creating these little door decs for, I’m making my floor look great. I have 44. I’ve got double, if not a little bit extra of how many people those people do. The requirements for how much work we complete are almost the same.
The pay or the benefits are equal.
They’re equal. There’s no difference. The only difference is they live further away from main campus. Maybe that’s a big pro, but it’s not an extra, it’s not double the amount of work of a pro. I have the second most amount of residents on campus. The other one is on the middle floor of Crosman, they have 55 residents for one RA. That’s a lot of people. You’re on call all of the time, and you’re making sure they’re okay, and you’re dealing with their problems. First-year students have a lot of problems and that’s totally okay, you should. You’re doing who knows what?
You’re exploring a whole new side of yourself. You’re exploring independence, you’re exploring a whole new level of responsibility. The thing is the ras are the first to notice all of that if your family or friends aren’t the people who notice that, we do because we live in the same area as you do. Dealing with a lot of those consequences of other people’s actions has a big effect. The university went, “Okay, we’ll just switch up the roles.”
Again, like I said, I wasn’t a big fan of that. I went, “If you changed how many RA’s, if you have to hire zero new people, there’s no additional roles to be filled. If you just changed everything out, the average resident to RA ratio would be like 30 students to 1 person.” It was more like 27. The university decided to split the roles up and now, the average resident to RA ratio is going to be 60. Now that my responsibilities are less, I do not ever have to hold this phone again. I don’t have to deal with being on call, I don’t have to fill out a bunch of incident reports anymore, but now I’m managing 60 students instead of 44. Now I’m adding fifteen extra students on to that.
How do you feel about that?
I’m totally okay with it. Do you know who I’m worried about? The people who are going from 19 students to 60 students. The maximum amount is now going up to 70. Actually, if I can be so for real, everyone can know this, I’m actually only going up to 46. I am the only RA on campus who will have 46 residents. It’s because of the building that I’m moving to.
The arrows are coming your way, Scott.
I worked really hard for two years, I had way more work than everybody else and now next year, I’m going to have significantly less work. I will have the same amount of work when it comes to engaging with students as I basically did this year. I’m only adding 2 students to my plate whereas other people are adding 50. I mean this to the most kind way to all of the ras who have to deal with this change, but it’s almost like I’m getting my slice of the pie finally. I’m getting a little bit of the relief.
Do you know what’s so fascinating as an outsider listening to all of this and not having been an RA? One, I have mad respect for ras. Two, for parents out there, there is a lot of politics on campus. It’s its own little world of politics. When you get involved, these are things that, Scott, I have a feeling you’re going to be very adept when you come out of the bubble because you’re going to have had all of these different experiences and you’re going to have to have figured it out and moved through them and you’ll know what you like and you’ll know what you don’t.
I got to ask, because you are somebody who speaks so freely about like all the different things and because you’re so involved, you look put together. You sound put together, you’ve got the resume that’s like, “This guy is so put together.” On the outside of the bubble, how can we help you? What would you like us to help you do as you transfer outside? Nd if you can’t speak for yourself, maybe you’ve had conversations with some of your friends and you guys have said, “Well, so we’ve done all of this here, and just like you were a freshman coming from high school to college, you’re now going to be the freshman class of the new world.” what is it that you want to know as freshman class new world, or what is it that you want help with?
If I’m going to be full on honest, I don’t know what I need help with right now. There’s a new challenge every day. My parents are moving. I’ve got to figure out where I’m going to be living when I go home. I reached out to my sister, I’ll be living with my sister. My commute from work is going from 4 minutes to 45 minutes, but that’s like I’m relying on my family for that. I don’t know what I’m doing for my job next year or the following year. That’s not really anyone else’s job to figure out for me.
Is there anybody that you talk to about that? Do you have somebody on campus that you’re like, “Let’s figure this out?”
There are a million career services opportunities that people can go talk to. That’s where it’s a difficult question because there are so many resources for people. Our job as students is to use them. Our job as younger people is to use them.
There are countless career services opportunities people can access and talk through. That’s where it becomes a difficult question—there are so many resources available. Our job as students, as younger people, is to use them. Share on XDo you think they’re getting used? Do you think the majority of students are tapping into all of those things?
I think enough students are for our university specifically to keep them. I think enough people are for our university to want to invest in them. At the same time, I don’t want the university shoving some of these resources down people’s throats, because then they’ll just resent it. They offer it and yeah, it’s being advertised and yeah, some people don’t know about it when they should know about it, but it’s like a double-edged sword.
It is up to the students. It is up to us to figure out what we need and what we want. It is really helpful when the university can provide a lot of those answers or give us a map of like, “Here are some steps that you could take to get in this general direction.” at the same time, people keep talking about not wanting to give a bunch of handouts and wanting people to work for it.
There are some areas where it’s like, that should have been harder and other areas where it’s like, that should have been easier. It’s hard to have an example on it, but like these classes, these classes that I’m taking that I’m paying all this money for should not be easy. They shouldn’t be. Finding housing should be, being able to live here should be, being able to pay for food should be. The basic needs of what is here should be. Being able to find a job, it shouldn’t be the easiest experience in the world. At the same time I’m submitting my job applications to an AI bot, not a person. If I could change one thing in the world, it would to be remove that experience.
Can I ask you, because I don’t know the process? You’re submitting your resume to an AI bot. Why are you submitting it to an AI bot? Who told you to submit it to an AI bot?
If you apply through LinkedIn, if you apply through Indeed, if you apply through for wherever, because that’s like where we know to go find jobs. People have created all of these internet capacities and things to use. They’re the tools that have been shoved down our throats all of our lives. They’re the ads that we’re shown when we were kids, that if you’re looking for a job, this is where you go.
Now I don’t know if it was targeted towards the kids or the parents sitting at home with their kids, but those are the tools that we know how to use. At the same time, those are all being monitored by AI now. You will get a response within 30 seconds, “You are not qualified for the job,” or you will never hear back from them. Now all these websites have these reputations of it’s just you’re just submitting. You could submit 200 applications a day and hear back by the end of the day by all of them that it’s a no. Applying for jobs has never been easier and getting rejected from a job has never been easier.
Have you applied for a job with someone you know?
That’s where it’s like building connections is really great. I now know I should probably be having connections. I should probably be connecting with people to find jobs. Actually, it’s just easier to do it that way, now from experience knowing that. Other people just didn’t use the opportunity they had in college or in their life experiences to get to know people or be like, “I need this job.”
I need to be at this location at this specific time to meet that person so then when I go submit my resume later or I email them, they know to look out for that. It’s not a hard skill to learn, but I don’t know if a lot of people have learned it. It’s all over the place. It’s a big mess because every time you come up with a, a solution, you present a whole new list of problems. There’s part of me where it’s just like, people need to figure it out.
It is not up to the world to figure it out for them. At the same time, the world should not be making it be difficult to figure it out. Where’s that line and what area is it like this versus this. As a 21-year-old who only has so much life experience, I have no clue. My job, honestly, when I’m here at this university or when I’m at the country club that I work at, is to make it so that no one knows how difficult it is.
It looks like ease, it looks like everything’s going great. I know that’s the goal of my department at school is they don’t want the students or parents to know about all the difficulties because all they want their people to be worried about is their first-year college experience. When I’m working at the country club, my job is to make sure that kids are swimming, people are having a good time and there’s an event every week. That’s what I’m worried about. They don’t need to be worried about the chlorine levels and we’re understaffed, or we’re dealing with all these different kinds of problems.
Who wants to know about those kinds of things? You just want to go enjoy the pool. When I’m going to apply for jobs and go all these kinds of things, I’m like, “Okay, my job was to do this.” If I got no feedback that day, that might be a good thing. Now I love at the end of our tours we give like the little QR code that says, “Give us some feedback.” at the same time, if no one had anything bad to say about the experience, that is a small win in my book.
I gave you glowing review on our tour, FYI. I appreciated how you laid all of that out and you’re right. I’m very happy to hear that as a junior, you are moving into the, “Therefore, I need to get better connected with human beings, get off the AI bots online in order to pursue a potential career path or just connections for opportunities in the future.” you’re right. I did step into the arena, I did step into my alma mater as a volunteer and as somebody who wanted to serve early and often.
I delivered in the time, talent, and treasure of what every university wants their alumni to do. It was in that opportunity that I saw your face, I saw a reflection of my face in this whole new generation. How, even though we’re a generation removed, nothing has changed as far as my personal struggle in finding opportunities after school, and now your personal struggle in possibly looking for these opportunities after school.
You’re trying to say, “Well, can it be a little bit easier on me? I am somebody, I’m Scott, I’m going out, I’m maximizing everything I can, but I’m still not finding this path very easy.” I hope to make that path easier for you through what I call academic adjacent TERN mentoring. I hope to make that happen because I do believe in the power of interpersonal connection. I do believe, Scott, and for people who are reading, you are somebody who obviously wants to dive in. You are somebody who loves to participate in lots of different things. You are happy about an unbalanced work-life balance because you have such a level of curiosity. For those who are reading, I believe Scott would be open to a mentor. Is that right?
Yes, I would be.
Scott is interested in his political science career. When you first told me what you were going to do right after school I was like, “And then we go to this route.” tell me about what you plan on doing right after school because it’s not necessarily poly-sci based.
This could change, and I’ll set this up a little bit. Service is really important to me and service is really important to my family. I am in a multi-generational service-based family where my grandfather helped build what the national parks are now. He helped build up what California’s national parks look like and even some of their ski resorts. My mom was heavy into environmental work within California and she was also one of the first top female firefighters of wildfire where she lived. It wasn’t very long-lived, but she was, that’s where she was.
Service is really important to me, and it’s equally important to my family. I come from a multi-generational, service-oriented family—my grandfather even helped shape what the national parks are today. Share on XI got to meet your mom. She sounds like such an awesome lady.
She’s one of my favorite people on the planet. I love my dad and I love my dad’s side of the family too, but my mom, she is an extreme fighter. Whereas my dad is an extreme caregiver, my mom is an extreme fighter. So,
We’ll see if we can get this one out for Mother’s Day because I’d love to be able to have her read this for Mother’s Day because it’s such an homage to her. Go ahead.
That would be awesome. My whole life, I’ve wanted to do some service, but I haven’t figured out really what that looked like. Secretly, my sister won’t admit it, but she did too. My sister now works for the police department close by where we lived and she’s behind the scenes and she works on all the computers. I’ve been thinking for a really long time, would I want to go into the military?
No, that seems a little too scary and a little too, especially right now, it’s a little too politically motivated to join the military. Even though I do like believe in what they stand for, it’s just right now, not really what I’m thinking I would be into. I went into over into the police or even becoming like a doctor and I was like, “I’m smart, but I do not want to be responsible for having someone open on a table and taking care of them or prescribing them medication, that’s a little too much for me.
Being a police officer, I’m like, “That’s a little hard.” And for its own reasons. I really thought about becoming a firefighter. The service-based thought has been since I was in seventh grade. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to become a teacher, because I was like that seems like a hard service-based job where you really just boots on the ground helping people.
Recently, I’ve had like a body transformation and where being a firefighter wasn’t really an option before. I wasn’t like in the right shape to be a firefighter. I did some big changes and I feel like now in this life, I am in shape to be a firefighter. I’m large, I’m strong and ultimately, I want to help people. That’s one route where I’m like, I don’t know if it will happen.
I really want to make it happen. I’m going to go to the firefighter school and my post-grad plan right now is to go to firefighter school and to figure out what that looks like and take classes on it and then they have trainings. It’s anywhere from 3 to 6 months long and I’m hoping next year, during school, I can get my EMT certification so that I can make that process a little bit quicker.
It’s really weird when I tell people what I want to do with my life because I say, “Well, right now I want to go be a firefighter. In a few years, once I’ve done that for a while and really feel like I’ve given back what my family’s put into the world, but also what my community’s done for me, then I want to go into politics. Let’s make a mess up on Capitol Hill. We’ve got some stuff to fix up, we’ve got some things to change, and I want to be in the frontline to make that happen.”
I don’t know what capacity that looks like. When I’m done with that, let’s go teach in a classroom with a bunch of sixteen-year-olds who don’t care about government, because the classes I would want to teach are like history and government classes. I think about that and it makes me chuckle a little bit because I’m just like, plans change all of the time. However, I’ve always want to do something service-based.
I’ve been really involved with politics for a really long time and since I was in in middle school, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. I think up until getting to college, I wasn’t really able to articulate what that all meant. My dad actually has been very clear with me. He’s like, “You do not have to have the same career your whole life.”
My dad did, and he moved around a few different times, but he had the same career. My mom moved around a lot and she had a lot of different careers, but I saw my dad as like a stable human being. There’s a little bit of me that’s like I strive for that. The fact that he came up to me and he was like, “No, like you do not have to have the same career. You can do all 3 of those in the span of 3 years if you really wanted to. That wouldn’t look too good on a resume, but like, you really could if that’s what you wanted to do.”
Your father sounds like a pragmatic dreamer too.
He’s like the calm in the storm. I consider my mom and I to be like a tornado all of the time and I love that about us. I feel like my mom and I are really similar. My dad is the one that can calm the storm down. He can have a good conversation with you. He’s also going to show up. I do not take lightly how blessed I was with the people who got to be my parents and who decided they wanted to raise me the way that they did. There were a bunch of bumpy roads and hard times. That does not discount all of the hard work that the both of them put in to get me here. They cannot help me with my collegiate career. It’s just not in the books, but they got me this far and it’s now my job to, I don’t want to say prove myself because I don’t feel like I need to prove myself to my parents.
I want to show them that all of that hard work was worth it. All of the late nights going to three different sports games, like I’d go to basketball and I’d go to tennis and then I’d like go play golf for a while or we’d struggle. My parents would be like, “Well, we’ve got groceries and we’ve got to figure that out, so we’re going to go do other stuff instead.” there were hard times where were really good times. Our money situation fluctuated a lot.
That also taught me a lot about how to budget, how to save. Don’t get me wrong, I’m 21 years old. There are days when that paycheck hits and all I want to do is go shopping. I’m a professional online shopper. I also know right now, 80% of my paycheck should be going into my savings. The way that I’ve set myself up, I don’t have too many expenses.
That’s really nice. As of right now, my phone bill and my insurance are the only thing my parents do pay for. Super grateful for that. Right now, I’m not quite ready to add that onto my, my bill but everything else I am taking care of. My mom will help me like if I want to go on a trip. She’ll be like, “Okay, I can help pay for the hotel or I can help pay for gas.” my parents do help and support me. I am super grateful for them both.
I can tell, you have an amazingly grateful heart. I think you’ve honored your parents in just being grateful and going out and pursuing your best self. Whether it’s firefighting, being an EMT, getting on Capitol Hill, or becoming a teacher, and all of it, I have a feeling, Scott, you are going to do every single one of those things and better for all the people who get to connect with you in those lanes.
What I’m very excited about is that you represent your university very well. They should be so proud of you. I was really blown away with the amount of information that you shared with us. You definitely bleed your colors. That is for sure. Even though you have more than your fair share of students as an RA I think that was on purpose.
Good for them. For the parents that are out there reading, you got to hope that there is a Scott that is an RA to your student as they’re trying to figure out that freshman year in particular. As he said, they’re underneath a lot of pressure to just try to figure themselves out in this new world of independence. Scott, I can talk to you forever. You are absolutely fascinating. Let’s leave on an interesting fact. What is it that people don’t know about you?
I might know something about you. Let’s get back to the very beginning. You’re calendaring. I’m a big fan of you calendaring method because it looks like a unicorn. It is every color of every rainbow. How does that help? For all of those who are not used to coloring your calendar, how do you color your calendar? You’ve got six jobs and you’re taking 21 credit hours typically. How do you color your calendar and why?
I can totally show you. Everything is super color-coded. Once swim season starts, it’s all in blue.
What color did we get? What color did TERN Talks get?
TERN Talks was brown, which is what I tend to do for all of my work.
What was this work, Scott?
No. Honestly, perfect way to start my morning. It’s my fun job. My fun job is the brown.
Okay, I’ll take it.
My calendar works because I’m passionate about everything I’m doing. Share on XWhereas my RA job is gray. It’s like a blue-gray. Everything free time related is green because green is the happiest color. Yellow’s the happiest color, but I made yellow my school calendar. If I’ve got a class for the day, it’s in yellow because of our school colors. Obviously, I had to choose that.
Giving a tour is in red. Everything free time related is in green, and then everything homework related is in lime green because it’s like, “This is your free time that you’re choosing to do a bunch of homework with.” once I get to swim season, which is by far the best time of the year and I don’t care what anybody says, I love swim season. Everyone in my swim team loves swim season too. It’s not as accurate because it doesn’t have everything in it, but I’ve got everything in blue.
Yes, cobalt blue. Very nice.
It’s all swim team related. For me, my to-do list and my calendar I made with a bunch of fun colors because I wanted it to be fun. Every year, I’ve gotten a little bit better at managing my calendar. Every year, the colors change just a little bit just so I can make it a little bit more fun, a little different, a little new. If I have a new job, I get to add a a new color to it all.
My calendar only works because I’m passionate about all the things that I’m doing. If I hated three of those jobs, I’d either leave or I’d have to make it a really fun color so I can convince myself it was really fun. This is not a very helpful tangent, but my calendar started out as just brown and green because I love trees. I’m from Washington so I love the tree. I’m like, “My day is going to be my two favorite colors,” which is brown and green.
I started doing way more swim team stuff, and then I realized how much better I look in blue. I started adding more blue. Blue became a color I used more often. I really just said, “Screw it.” I used to have like 4 different browns and 4 different greens for all the different things I was doing. It would be like all the way from a really light green to a really dark green.
Thank God you’re not colorblind. I like more of the varied colors because it’s more fun. It’s more you. You’re into all of these different things and it- it screams everything that, you know, you are and you’re just such a joy.
I really appreciate this conversation. Thank you so much.
It’s my pleasure. It’s my privilege. Scott, thank you so much for giving us the insight of Gen Z on campus- um, in the thick of it, involved in so many different things. You did an amazing job during the tour. I knew having you on the show would just open up different areas. The whole conversation on AI, whether it’s tech versus in person, I really am hopeful that with who you are and how you present that you do everything you can to get yourself further networked.
Whoever’s going to pick you up for whatever role you’re going to want in life is going to be very fortunate to add you to the team. I will say, he’s going to let you know how he feels about things, which, as a hiring manager, we need to know these things too. For all of us who don’t mind a little feedback, bring it Scott. We’ll take your feedback. I’m going to have to say goodbye but- because I know your calendar, I just saw it, and you’ve got things to do.
I’ve got a final in four hours and I’ve got to do some studying. I’ve got to fill up my note card with all the things that I need.
It is final season. Do an amazing job and I hope to see you back out at CU Boulder very soon and we’ll keep in touch. For anybody who wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do it? Do you have an email address? Are you on LinkedIn? What would you like?
I’m on LinkedIn, Richard Scott Seibel. I’ve got an email. It’s also on my LinkedIn. That’s probably just going to be the easiest way to reach for me is via LinkedIn because everything else, social media wise and email wise, I tend to keep pretty private. LinkedIn, that’s pretty much where everyone can have access to if you want to get to know me. I’ve been told I’m pretty good at sales, so if you can convince me to come over to sales, I’d go do that, but right now I’ve got to go do some public service work.
He’s going to be on the market for a career in about a year. Good luck in your last year of school and we will chat with you soon. For everybody else, thanks for joining us. Thanks for reading my chat with Scott. As I said, we’ve got amazing young people out there. You can hear their dreams, you can hear their desire, you can hear their enthusiasm. We’re very fortunate to be able to bring them through. As a mentor myself, let’s find ways to connect with people like Scott because you never know how he can make a difference in this world and he’s going to make a difference in many different areas. Until next time. Thank you so much for reading and we’ll catch up with you soon.
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