Professor of Mathematics Lawrence Udeigwe, Director of Arches at MU.
LAWRENCE UDEIGWE / COURTESY
Maizy Swift Senior Writer
The Manhattan University (MU) campus has been adjusting to the usage of artificial intelligence, integrating it into curriculum and welcoming in new ways for students to work with emerging technologies with the help of the ARCH program.
Ashlee Okunonke, a senior computer science major, spoke to The Quadrangle about her experience using AI in the classroom.
“It’s been a positive experience for me, because I feel like I use AI in a positive way,” Okunonke said. “So I will ask Chat GBT or ask Claude to help me through my teacher’s PowerPoints which they reiterate back to me and act as a professor itself.”
Okunonke has a concentration in Artificial Intelligence, where her classes work with different forms of AI to see how far they have come along, what progress needs to be made, and how to understand it in general.
“For example, we will have a coding assignment, and he’ll ask us to generate code with AI and then compare it to the code that we made ourselves, and see the discrepancies, who did it better, and the points that artificial intelligence is still missing.” Okunonke said.
Okunonke will be working with AI in her future, which makes this program very useful for her.
“I have a chance to do my master’s in artificial intelligence, so it would be a part of my future,” Okunonke said. “I do think that it’s on the uprise, because a lot of businesses are trying to automate their workflow with AI.”
In a previous report by The Quadrangle, Hany Guirguis, Ph.D., Dean of the O’Malley School of Business reflected on this year’s Innovation Challenge at MU.
“The Innovation Challenge highlights the power of collaboration by bringing together students from Engineering, the Kakos School of Arts and Sciences and the O’Malley School of Business to work on shared, real-world problems,” Guirguis wrote in an email to The Quadrangle. “By combining technical expertise, analytical thinking and business strategy, the competition reinforces that strong ideas are best developed through interdisciplinary teamwork.”
Lawrence Udeigwe, Ph.D., a mathematics professor at MU and director of ARCH – Analytics, Research, Creativity and Humanity – described how AI is an integral part of the program.
“It’s the university’s latest initiative to give students room for making their experience at MU more future proof and more interdisciplinary,” Udeigwe said. “[When students] leave MU, the education they receive will be able to evolve with the time.”
The program will use AI as a part of opening up students’ majors to research projects and opportunities to work with technology no matter their major.
“They’ll be able to understand how it works and understand the ethical implications of using it,” Udeigwe said. “And then we want every student to be able to come up with a project and solve it by themselves, with other students, without the constraint of their major.”
AI is something that Udeigwe believes students must learn to work with and understand because of its role in our world.
“I think AI is here to stay, but we as an academic environment owe it to humanity to study it, to keep studying it, to know when to restrict ourselves from using it and to know when to really probe it,” Udeigwe said.
The ARCH program will be adding some new specialties to the MU curriculum.
“We’re going to be coming up with three new majors, data science, computational neuroscience, integrated marketing communications and then we’re going to be rolling out two new miners, also sustainability studies and AI for all.” Udeigwe said.
The ARCH program will be fully installed during the Fall 2026 semester at MU, welcoming students of all majors to take advantage of what it has to offer.