For AI Ambassadors — students who climbed the Ladder and now walk others up it.
An ambassador is not the best AI user in the room. An ambassador makes it easier for someone else to start. Most people you help will have never tried AI, or were told using it is cheating. Your job is not to impress them. Sit with them while they play, and let them make their own judgments.
Two reasons to teach it: it spreads an important skill to students who would never start on their own, and teaching something is the fastest way to learn it properly yourself.
The climb is theirs. Never touch their keyboard. The moment you type, the exercise becomes a demonstration, and they learn only that you can do it. Whatever happens on the screen, their hands put it there.
Open to any student in the college, any major, with no prior AI experience needed. There is an application, and it is open now. It lives in the AI Ambassadors course in Canvas — join the course with your CSUN login and the application is in there.
Spots are limited. We expect more strong applications than places, so selection is competitive and finishing the Ladder does not guarantee one. We would rather tell you now than after you have done sixteen exercises. Ambassadors receive a $200 gift card after leading their first session.
What counts as a session. At least three people doing Rung 1 on their own devices, with you there. A club meeting, a study group, a dorm lounge, a table in the courtyard, a Zoom — the format is up to you, and none of it needs to be formal. What makes it a session is that their hands were on their own keyboards.
Let us know when you have scheduled a session, and afterwards send a few sentences on how it went — what landed, what confused people, what you would do differently. You post that as the Session Report in the Ambassador Canvas course. That is all the reporting there is.
Two things have to be done before you apply:
1. Climb all sixteen exercises yourself, in order.
2. Write it up: two pages on what you tried, which exercises surprised you, and what you would now hand to AI and what you would not let it near. Name the exercises. Not a rung-by-rung recap — your account of the whole climb. That write-up is the application.
Dates. Climb at your own pace. Applications are open now; we will announce the closing date here before it comes.
Guide only the rungs you have climbed. If you are at Rung 3, you can guide Play and Direct. Do not guide Verify until you have traced your own claims to their sources.
| Rung | What you do | What you never do |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Play | Hand them the keyboard, point at exercise 01, and stay relaxed. Laugh at the results with them. Make it clear that playing around is the whole assignment. | Demonstrate. If you show off, they conclude they could never do this. |
| 2 · Direct | Let them write the weak prompt first, then ask: what did your edit change, and what didn’t? | Dictate the prompt. A prompt you wrote teaches them nothing about steering. |
| 3 · Apply | Ask them to bring real work of their own — from their major, their job, their life. Ask where the answers started thinning. | Judge the output for them. The column they are filling is their own performance, not the AI’s. |
| 4 · Interrogate | Ask which disagreement matters. Then be quiet while they decide. | Break the tie. If you pick the winner, the call was yours, not theirs. |
| 5 · Verify | Tell them before they start that “I couldn’t find a source” is a passing answer. | Supply the source. If you find it for them, they have not done the exercise. |
The hardest part of this role is restraint. Every rung will tempt you to show instead of wait. Wait — the climb only counts if they do it themselves.