Why Am I Learning This? Students Discovering the Usefulness of General Chemistry to Their Career Interests via ChatGPT

This activity presents an assignment designed to help general chemistry students connect course content to their individual career interests by incorporating interactions with ChatGPT. Students are provided with structured prompts to interact with ChatGPT to learn, reflect, and verify how a chemistry topic is relevant to their career interest. The assignment was administered to first-semester general chemistry students in an experimental design. Although no statistically significant difference was found on students’ perceptions of the utility of chemistry, more than 40 unique job pathways were explored by students using ChatGPT and ChatGPT had a success rate of about 80% in providing students with relevant scholarly article links. The majority of students would like to see a similar assignment in future classes and found the assignments engaging and helpful for understanding how chemistry topics apply to their future careers. Suggested adaptations of the assignment are also presented including increasing the interactivity between students and ChatGPT, further exploring scholarly articles with the help of ChatGPT, and exploring other dimensions of utility beyond career-readiness.