EA - About my job: "Content Specialist" by Lizka

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: About my job: "Content Specialist", published by Lizka on September 9, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I've been the Content Specialist on the Online Team at CEA since early 2022. People often don't know what "Content Specialist" means and it seems useful to have more "about my job" posts, so here's mine.This got long, so I encourage you to skip to whatever you want to see. I include my background, what I actually work on, and some quick reflections (what I value about the role, what's been hard, and the skills that I develop).My background & how I got hereThis ended up longer than expected, so tl;dr: math and comparative literature double major, helping to organize 3 summers of Canada/USA Mathcamp, getting into EA, research fellowship at Rethink Priorities, "Events Generalist" at CEA, and then being invited to apply to Aaron's job and ending up here. Non-tl;dr:I studied math and comparative literature in college (and graduated in 2021). I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do after college, and was somewhat defaulting to math academia or something education-related. I was spending my summers doing ~math research, working at Canada/USA Mathcamp (in a mostly non-academic role where we ran events, helped make camp run, and more - I think this made me better at making-things-happen and made me a lot more confident), and teaching math to excited kids.Meanwhile, a friend introduced me to EA, which clicked pretty quickly. The issue was that I didn't see myself contributing; I didn't want to do CS, didn't particularly want to study economics, didn't think I would last long earning-to-give, and didn't think I had other real skills. But I read a bunch, listened to the 80K Podcast, went to the 2020 Student Summit, and had a call with 80,000 Hours, where they told me to apply to Rethink Priorities (and defer graduate school). I followed that advice.I wrote about my experience at RP here. This experience was great. It made me feel that fairly generalist research was actually a viable/useful path. It also got me over my Forum-intimidation and got me to post my first Forum post (and some others).While I was at Rethink Priorities, I had applied to an "Events Generalist" role at CEA - largely because it seemed relatively interesting, CEA had "effective altruism" in its name (so I thought it was going to be at least somewhat useful), I wanted to test out something like ops, and I really wanted to have a job. I got and took the job, which I was expecting to be pretty low-responsibility since I was so junior.I got more responsibility than I expected, which was both scary and very motivating. On my second week, I ended up being one of two(?) people from the Events Team at the Coordination Forum (I was there to help make it go smoothly and to take notes in some sessions), during which we also made the decision to double the size of EA Global London 2021 (happening in around a month). It felt like a lot of the work that I was doing just wouldn't get done if I wasn't there (or maybe something else important wouldn't get done). After EA Global: London 2021, things calmed down a bit. I was still writing sometimes, and I sometimes contributed a bit to side-projects, some of which grew out a bit.Then Aaron reached out to say that he was leaving, and he was wondering if it would be ok to send me the job application. Skimming Aaron's messages from the time, it looks like Aaron reached out because of a combination of my Forum writing, my performance on the Events Team, and encouragement from Linch when Aaron checked with him. I checked with my then-manager Amy to see if she would be ok with me applying. I was very stressed about this, but Amy was very supportive. I went into the application pretty confident that I wouldn't get far (and I cried after the interview). That's the role...