EA - My personal takeaways from EAGxLatAm by CristinaSchmidtIbáñez

Link to original articleWelcome 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: My personal takeaways from EAGxLatAm, published by CristinaSchmidtIbáñez on January 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a personal post and does not necessarily represent the views of Rethink Priorities.This year I attended EAGxLatAm (6-8 January) in Mexico City.I thought it would be a very valuable exercise to share my own takeaways from it as well as to encourage other attendees’ to share theirs. My takeaways are based on the 22 1-on-1s I had (not counting casual 1-on-1s that happened during the conference). I talked mostly (ca. 70%) with Latin American students at different levels of their undergraduate degrees.So without further ado, these are my takeaways:Things I was rather surprised aboutLatin American students don’t seem tobe aware of the concept of option value and more specifically, they don’t seem to be explicitly considering this a criteria for their career decision-makingbe considering the “ladder of tests” e.g. when thinking about pursuing a specialization (like a master’s or PhD) often they had not yet considered “cheaper test” to see if that degree would be the right move for themmore broadly, they don’t seem to be aware of the different criteria they are comparing different options withLatin American students seem (internally) to feel really pressured to do a master’s and/or PhD abroad (e.g. US).When I dug deeper for the reasons for this, they mentionedJob/financial securityA pathway for them “to be taken seriously”(this one really saddened me): That they feel they are “worth very little in EA” if they don’t get these degreesLatin American students seem to have a hard time thinking ambitiously, probably more so than the “average EA”.When these students come from low/middle income backgrounds then the issue seems to be that they are carrying a lot of “baggage” from their past that makes it hard for them to “think big” about the impact they can have in the futureIf they come from more high income backgrounds then the issue seems to rather be imposter syndrome.Things I was more or less aware of but were (mentally) strongly highlightedFounders/directors of projects usually don’t plan for the changes in the type of work they do as their projects/organizations grow and therefore find themselves after a couple of years doing a lot of tasks they don’t enjoy doingOperations management (particularly HR) isn’t well planned (if planned at all) when nonprofit entrepreneurs are drafting project plans and fundraising. As a result, project budgets don’t account properly for these costs.When operations management is planned for a new project it looks something like “we’ll budget an ops person (and that'll solve our issues)”. The result of this is that by the time that (ops) person is hired, it is expected that one person solves all operational issues for the projectOften by the time projects receive funding they don’t know “what to do with the money” and start looking fast into fiscal sponsors or other ways to receive the fundsSome things I suggest (or even suggested during my 1-on-1s)For community builders to talk with their community members more about how they are comparing different career options. I suggested to one community builder experimenting with a workshop for doing career weighted factor modelsFor students in particular to seek (career) mentoring opportunitiesHaving a public list of project ideas (for the EA space) for non-programmatic things like operations, HR, management etc. so people that would like to work on these things have a better sense on what ideas to prioritizeFor a service to exist that offers founders “career check-ins” once a year where they have to take inventory of how their list of responsibilities has changed and consider alternative paths either within their own organizations or outside of the...