Why I Built This

I taught gender studies to college students for 13 years. During that time, I had no idea what to tell students about preparing for careers. I knew how hiring worked for professors, but that's a really different process than searching for corporate or non-profit work. I sent my advisees to the career center and checked in with them about it afterward.

When I left higher ed in 2023, it was a steep learning curve figuring out how to get a job outside the classroom. I spent a lot of money hiring a career coach I thought could help me translate my background for a non-academic audience. She couldn't.

The turning point for me was an AI chat where I said, "I feel like my differentiating skills are distilling clarity from complexity and being good at systems thinking while also having high emotional intelligence. Can you help me turn this into a 'professional brand?'" That brief exchange gave me far more clarity than three hours with an expensive career coach. It set me down a path of learning how to translate my skills from academic terms to language recruiters would understand.

Throughout my learning process, I thought about what I'd do differently if I were still in the classroom. I now believe that students need all the help they can get preparing for a job search. It is rough out here. Translating skills developed in humanities and social science majors is especially difficult, but employers need your skills more now than ever.

That's why I built Unbracket. I wanted a way to share what I'd learned with students and recent grads, and I wanted to give you the shortcut I didn't have.

A Note on AI Use

I know many of you are concerned about AI. I am too.

Intellectual property violations are ongoing and largely unaddressed. Surveillance is built into most AI business models. The cognitive effects of offloading thinking to AI systems are only beginning to be studied. And the environmental costs—energy and water consumed at scale to run these systems—are serious enough that they've made it into congressional hearings. Meta's data center in Georgia has been linked to contaminated drinking water in surrounding communities, and residents in Arizona are watching data centers compete with farms for a water supply that's already under pressure.

I compost and grow as many of my own vegetables as I can to reduce my carbon footprint, and I'm researching hempcrete for a carbon-negative home build. I'm not cavalier about climate crisis.

So why did I build Unbracket with AI?

My AI use started with two realizations: 1) Though I'm concerned about the impacts of AI on the environment and human connection, it isn't going to go away, even if we manage to restrain data center construction. 2) Since I was going to be expected to use these tools in the workplace, knowing how to use them well, and critically, was something I needed to practice. Refusing to engage no longer felt viable to me.

Here's what that meant in practice for Unbracket. The biggest environmental concern with AI isn't really about individual apps like this one. It's about Amazon, Google, and Microsoft building massive data centers to serve large corporations each spending more than $100,000 a month on AI tools alone. That's a legitimate crisis. But it doesn't scale down linearly to individual uses.

The International Energy Agency's 2026 report on AI and energy notes that simple text queries now typically consume less electricity than running a television over the same period of time. One Unbracket session—the handful of AI calls that generate your feedback—uses roughly as much electricity as a television running for a few minutes.

I built Unbracket to give you a targeted, focused session that surfaces feedback calibrated to your actual background, so you're not paying a resume writer, and you're not spending hours exchanging messages with an AI chatbot refining the same bullet points in circles. One session, useful output, done.

I'm not here to tell you what to think about AI. These are genuinely difficult questions. I want you to know that I'm thinking about them, that I share your concerns, and that I didn't build this carelessly.

After 13 years of teaching college students, I'm convinced you all have the skills and determination needed to address the multiple crises we face. I want you in roles where you'll be able to make meaningful decisions and design brilliant solutions. I hope Unbracket helps you get there.