Hi everyone,
I'm Ben from 80,000 Hours. We do careers advice for effective altruists.
If you have any questions about your career, please post them here and I'll do my best to answer them.
In the meantime, you can check out our online career guide: 80000hours.org
Ben
PS Feel free to ask whatever's most pressing to you - don't worry about whether it's relevant to other readers or not.
Update Jan 2016: We're no longer checking this thread for new questions!
Please ask on our Linkedin group instead: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/5057625
Thanks for the reply! I don't know just yet what kind of advocacy I'd be doing - I would hope to figure that out as I went along. Maybe that's a point against PPES, but maybe even being an effective-altruism-minded public figure of any sort would do some good? The PPES degree is only a few years old so there's no real data on where people end up, but similar degrees at York and Oxford list finance among a broad range of commonly chosen careers (http://www.ppe.ox.ac.uk/index.php/a-future-with-ppe) (https://www.york.ac.uk/pep/graduate-profiles/). I suppose this would make PPES the broader option, allowing me to change direction later on. Do you feel that this characteristic is more valuable than speeding up my entry into a potentially high-impact position?
Regarding the universities, all the students I've talked to in both seem to love their respective universities, but Trinity is ranked higher and is much better known internationally.
Strongly urge Trinity.
It will be easier to get a job in almost any sector with a degree from Trinity rather than a degree from Galway (particularly outside Ireland), you will probably meet more interesting/driven people there, and you can try to make your PPES degree more quantitative if you want through particular choices (eg the econometrics option in third year economics or quantitative methods in fourth year economics), although it is certainly too early to be making specific choices about modules at this stage!
As others have said, it will also keep your options broader, which is valuable for all of us but particularly those of us who are still trying to work out what we are particularly good at.