AI Essentials Course — Phase 4: Mastery and Application
Session 19: Creating Custom Instructions and Templates
Build your personal AI toolkit — creating reusable prompt templates for your most common academic tasks so you can get great results every time without starting from scratch.
Learning Objectives
What You'll Learn
By the end of this session, you will be able to:
- Create a reusable research summary prompt template
- Create a writing feedback prompt template tailored to your specific needs
- Create a brainstorming template for your academic field
- Test each template and refine it based on the results
Platform Access
Getting Started with Google Gemini
Follow these steps to access Google Gemini and get ready for today's lesson.
- Go to https://gemini.google.com and sign in.
- Start a new conversation.
- Open a separate document — Google Docs, Word, or even a simple text file — to save your templates as you create them. This document will become your personal prompt library.
- Think about the three or four AI tasks you've found most useful in this course. Today you'll create templates for your most frequently needed tasks.
- You're ready to begin. Today's session is about building infrastructure — tools you'll use for months and years after this course ends.
Free Account Required
All platforms used in this course offer free accounts with no credit card required. If you already have an account, simply sign in. The free tier gives you everything you need to complete this session.
Core Lesson
Today's Lesson
Read through this lesson carefully before starting the practice exercises below.
You've now spent nineteen sessions developing an impressive range of AI skills. You've learned persona prompts, chain-of-thought reasoning, document analysis, literature synthesis, iterative refinement, and multi-platform workflows. Today, you'll do something that will make all of those skills more accessible and consistent in your daily academic work: you'll create a personal library of reusable prompt templates.
A prompt template is a pre-written prompt structure with placeholder spots where you fill in the specific details for each use. Rather than writing your research summary prompt from scratch every time you want to analyze an article — and risking leaving out the elements that make it work well — you have a template that includes all the proven elements. You simply fill in the specific topic, article, or context, and you're ready to go.
Think about how professionals in other fields use templates. Lawyers have standard contract templates that they customize for each client. Doctors have standardized note formats that ensure they never miss important information. Teachers have lesson plan templates. Templates don't reduce your professionalism or creativity — they ensure that your baseline is always high, freeing your attention for the parts that require genuine customization.
Creating an effective prompt template requires thinking about what makes your most successful prompts work. What context do you always need to provide? What task structure produces the best results? What format do you most often want? What persona, if any, should the AI adopt? When you write these elements into a template, you're capturing the hard-won knowledge from your weeks of practice and making it instantly reusable.
Google Gemini is a good platform for template testing because it handles a wide range of task types well and tends to respond clearly to structured input. You can test your templates in Gemini today, but your templates will work across any AI platform — they're not platform-specific. Your prompt library is yours, and it travels with you to whatever tool you use.
By the end of today's session, you'll have three functional, tested templates that you can use immediately in your academic work. These templates, combined with the skills you've developed across nineteen sessions, constitute your personal AI toolkit — a set of capabilities and tools that will serve you throughout your graduate career and beyond.
Hands-On Practice
Practice Exercise
Follow these steps in Google Gemini. Take your time — there's no rush. Learning happens through doing.
- Open Gemini and create your Research Summary Template. Test it: "You are a research librarian helping a graduate student. Please analyze the following academic source and provide: (1) A 3-sentence summary of the main argument, (2) The research methodology used, (3) Three key findings, (4) One limitation of the study. Source: [paste abstract or summary here]"
- Save this template in your document. Test it with one of your academic articles and note if any adjustments would make it better.
- Create your Writing Feedback Template: "You are an experienced academic writing tutor. Please review the following paragraph from my [paper type] and provide: (1) One grammar or mechanics issue, (2) One clarity issue with a suggested revision, (3) One way to make the tone more [academic/accessible/formal], (4) One overall strength to preserve. Paragraph: [paste paragraph here]"
- Save and test this template with a paragraph from your own writing.
- Create your Brainstorming Template: "I am a graduate student in [your field]. Please brainstorm 10 potential research angles on the following topic: [topic]. For each idea, provide: the angle, why it's interesting, and one methodological approach that could study it."
- Save all three templates. Test each one and write a brief note for yourself about what works well and what you'd adjust for your specific needs.
Try These
Example Prompts to Try
Copy any of these prompts directly into Google Gemini and see what happens. Feel free to modify them to match your own academic interests.
Summary
Key Takeaways
- Prompt templates — pre-written prompt structures with placeholder spots for specific details — make great AI results consistently accessible without starting from scratch each time.
- Effective templates capture the Context, Task, and Format elements that make your best prompts work, turning one-time success into repeatable results.
- Creating a personal prompt library — a document of your most useful templates — is one of the most practically valuable things you can do after this course.
- Templates are platform-independent — they work across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and any other AI tool you use.
Template Creation and Prompt Library Building
You've built a personal prompt library — a collection of reusable, tested templates for your most common academic AI tasks. This template-building skill is how you convert the learning from this course into a permanent, practical toolkit. Every template you create and refine is a piece of your professional AI infrastructure.