Designing AI Tools, Put Underserved Students at Center of Student Success in Higher Education

Ayodeji Ake 

The email comes late, usually after a deadline has passed. A student has taken the wrong course, missed a requirement, or misunderstood a pathway that seemed straightforward on paper. Somewhere between departmental pages, advising wait times, and scattered documents, something important was lost.

It happens often, just not loudly. Not every student knows what to ask, or who to ask, or when to ask it. Some figure it out eventually. Others don’t. The system keeps moving either way.

What makes it harder is that the answers already exist, buried in course catalogs, policy documents, and internal systems built more for storage than for understanding. The information is there. The clarity is not. For many students, especially those without consistent access to advising, navigating that gap becomes part of the academic experience itself.

This is the space Chiemela Uzunma Kalu chose to work in. MISGPT, the advising tool she developed, is grounded in real institutional academic documents, program requirements, course structures, and university-specific records, and turns them into responses students can actually use. It doesn’t generalize across schools or rely on broad datasets. It answers based on the institution itself, reflecting the exact academic environment a student is in.

“I did not set out to build AI tools,” she says. “I set out to solve a problem I kept seeing, students with all the potential in the world falling through gaps that data could have closed.”

The emphasis on accessibility and clarity is deliberate. The system is designed to meet students at the point of confusion, not after it. Questions don’t need to be perfectly framed, and answers are not buried in institutional language. Instead of requiring students to interpret complex documents, MISGPT translates them into guidance that is direct, usable, and tied to real decisions, what to take next, what to fix, what to avoid.

There’s a broader pattern underneath this. New tools are being introduced across higher education, but the students who struggle most with navigating the system are often the last to benefit from them. Access isn’t just about availability, it’s about whether something is usable when it matters, and whether it reaches those who need it most.

“Being an immigrant, a woman, and a technologist in this space means I see problems that others walk past,” Kalu says. “That perspective is not a disadvantage. It is the most valuable thing I bring to this work.”

Her long-term focus reflects that awareness. The aim is not limited rollouts or controlled pilots, but deployment across institutions serving underrepresented student populations, where clearer, more immediate academic guidance can change trajectories in ways that are practical and measurable. In those environments, the difference between having information and understanding it is often the difference between staying on track and falling behind.