EA - Things I did in my job search I recommend by ChanaMessinger

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: Things I did in my job search I recommend, published by ChanaMessinger on October 4, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Made a big google doc of ALL the things I could do. Not just a or b but literally everything I could think of, shared it around a bunch. Asked other people what I could do Tried to think radically more ambitiously Listed skills I thought I had and then thought of jobs that would use those Applied to 80k advising Which caused me to write up my thoughts on lost of things and answer lots of questions And I had a nice chat, which ended up leading to the job I ended up taking Talked to, on the margin, probably too many people, but SO many people exploring new spaces (institutional decision making, distillation, etc) Asking what they thought was needed in those spaces Talked to my friends about my job search, which led to more opportunities Asked "If I was going to work in x [AI Safety, biosecurity, etc] what would I do?" and set 5 minute timers to generate ideas. (Thank you to Michelle Hutchinson for this) Tried to ask a variety of questions on how I might approach this search What skills do I have that are helpful for the world? What skills will I want to have in 5-10 years? What might cause me to burn out? How can I mitigate that? What are my current bottlenecks? What's stopping me? What's missing in the space? What's the low hanging fruit? How can I be ambitious? What job will give the most mentorship / the manager I work best with? Was super honest in all work trials and interviews about my level of interest and skill and what other jobs I was applying for Had conversations about why this job over that one was more impactful Used work trials to try to assess my own interest in the work (this didn't work for me, I got excited about everything) Wrote another google doc when I had honed it down to three possibilities, shared it with my friends and family, got comments, thought hard. Made the call. So far, enjoying my job! Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.