Thank you, I will definitely check out the advanced series!

I loved this story and the way you told it. You took some risks and learned from setbacks and ultimately got to a point in your career where, I believe, many people would like to be. As a middle aged person with a non-linear career (I started my working life in debt collection - shhhh!) it gives me hope that I can start a new chapter even if it doesn't look like a traditional "job." Thanks for sharing.

What advice do you have for mid-career professionals who only have ~40K hours left?

You've done some wonderful research and this is a great list. It does seem very heavy on AI, with only a few projects addressing other existential risks. I'd be curious to know about some other ideas that didn't make the cut for this post, but are aimed at addressing other risks.

Kudos to you for having the courage to write this post. One of the things I like most about it is the uncanny understanding and acknowledgement of how people feel when they are trying to enter a new social group. EAs tend to focus on logic and rationality but humans are still emotional beings. I think perhaps we may underrate how these feelings drive our behavior. I didn't know that university organizers were paid - that, to me, seems kind of insane and counter to the spirit of altruism. I really like the idea of making it need based. One other thing your post made me reflect on is how community-building strategies and epistemics may differ at less-selective versus highly-selective universities. Your experience is at highly-selective schools but I'm curious how many EA groups there are at regional comprehensive universities and open access schools, or HBCUs, community colleges, tribal colleges, etc. Those student populations are very different but may bring valuable perspectives to EA if effort is made to engage them.

Thanks for this post, as I've been trying to find a high-impact job that's a good personal fit for 9 months now. I have noticed that EA organizations use what appears to be a cookie-cutter recruitment process with remarkable similarities across organizations and cause areas. This process is also radically different from what non-EA nonprofit organizations use for recruitment. Presumably EA organizations adopted this process because there's evidence behind its effectiveness but I'd love to see what that evidence actually is. I suspect it privileges younger, (childless?) applicants with time to burn, but I don't have data to back up this suspicion other than viewing the staff pages of EA orgs.