We hope the In-Depth EA Program has helped you think through various issues within Effective Altruism, as well as develop friendships and connections with other aspiring Effective Altruists.
In this final week, you will participate in an exercise to see how what we’ve learnt has affected our key uncertainties, career-planning and cause prioritisation. You’ll use this exercise to start to map out next steps, which we can continue to work on as we learn more about ourselves and the world.
Then you will then bring your plans to the session and discuss them with the other fellows and your moderator. The aim is to interrogate and solidify one anothers’ plans, advising and getting advice from one another about how to achieve them.
<aside> ❗ Go to last page of the EA Handbook (More to explore on 'Putting it into Practice') for a comprehensive list of opportunities to get involved. A list of resources about EA can be found here and a list of local EA groups can be found here.
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We find it is often hard to turn the things you learn in the program into practical actions. So we recommend spending some of the final session talking about what you plan to do next and getting advice from other fellows. To make the most of this it might help to write down as many possible next steps as you can think of. These might be questions you want to look into; things you want to read; skills you want to build; ways to test your interest in various careers; or ways you think you can improve the world.
At the start of the program you listed some questions you wanted to look into during the discussions. Did all of these get resolved? Did you discover any more questions you’d like to look into? Write down all the questions you might want to look into after the program.
It might help to:
During the program, were there some skills or pieces of knowledge you found yourself wishing you had? Could you develop these in the coming weeks, months, or years? Examples could include forecasting, some mathematics a fellow used, a particular academic framework you haven’t come across before, or anything else. Write down whatever skills come to mind and mention them in the session, and maybe other fellows can give you some advice on learning these.
Updating your cause prioritisation, will lead to some new career uncertainties. 80,000 Hours have resources on making career decisions, a key ideas page, and some problem profiles which we can use to generate some next steps. These next steps might be different depending on whether you have no career plan at all, a couple of open options, or a very specific trajectory, but there should be new areas to investigate regardless of your situation.
Generate some next steps for your career plan. Maybe this is doing some cheap tests for possible career paths, or making some progress on a big career decision, or applying to open positions or further study programmes. Write down whatever pops into your head and bring it to the session