Progress Open Thread: October // Student Summit 2020

I'll kick things off!

This month, I finished in second place at the Magic: the Gathering Grand Finals (sort of like the world championship). I earned $20,000 in prize money and declared that I would donate half of it to GiveWell, which gave me an excuse to talk up EA on camera for thousands of live viewers and post about it on Twitter.

This has been a whirlwind journey for me; I did unexpectedly well in a series of qualifying tournaments. Lots of luck was involved. But I think I played well, and I've been thrilled to see how interested my non-EA followers are in hearing about charity stuff (especially when I use Magic-related metaphors to explain cause prioritization).

I started working at Rethink Priorities. I'm pretty happy about it! 

I tried applying to EA jobs about 3 years ago, and didn't have much luck. 

I don't think this is causal, but I think my emotional/cognitive relationship to applying to EA jobs have changed. 3 years ago, I was more like "I want to have a job at an EA org because that was a path I heard that can have more impact, so I really want to have an EA job so I can have more impact" and was definitely much more in "job application mode." This time around, it felt much more like "okay there are some stuff I want to do. It seems like these orgs will let me progress my goals better." All-in-all, I think this was probably a much healthier relationship to have to my work and EA aspirations.

My parents recently sold an environmental services company and used a significant chunk of the windfall to endow a family foundation on whose board I sit. I recommended, and the rest of the Board agreed, to include GiveDirectly and AMF in our 2020 grants.

I started as the full-time Co-Director of EA NYC two months ago! Since Aaron Mayer and I started, we've accomplished a bunch of things, including launching a new website (just published yesterday!), starting 1-1 calls, a NYC job board (updated weekly), and our new Rings program to help EA NYCers start projects together! 

I'm loving the new job and am really excited about what we've been able to do in such a short time :) Hopefully the coming 10 months are just as productive!

Btw we are still taking applications for Rings, if anyone is interested in applying - since it will be all remote for now anyways, we are happy to have non-NYC people apply (though being able to meet during EST-friendly times will be helpful).

I've been learning to code with Python and I did my first tiny bit of machine learning - I figured out how to do a polynomial regression to look at global average sea surface temperatures!

After playing with the idea for quite a while, I finally made a couple of youtube videos about forecasting.  I've still got a lot to learn about both production and editing, but I received really valuable feedback which I expect to help a lot going forward.

 Hoping to complete an "Intro to forecasting" series over the next few weeks.

Edit: also this thread is a great idea. Thanks for making it :).

Here's a looking-at-the-bright-side sort of progress:

I've been bewildered for most of this year about why I'm struggling so much to get things done. Just 2020-related stress doesn't explain it.

Well, I think I've figured out that I'm just really burned out (or, as Cal Newport puts it, in a state of "deep procrastination").

...in one of my two majors! So, I've changed the burned-out major to a minor. Now I'll graduate in just a few months, giving me more time to learn things and explore career options (which I'm suddenly more excited about). 

My path ahead isn't exactly straightforward, but at least I've gained some valuable knowledge about what it could look like.

I won a prize at the Cornell Sustainability Hackathon! My team worked on a business idea for a waste heat recovery device for trucks to improve their fuel efficiency. We won the "Most Transitional Hack" award for positioning our product as a stepping stone to fleet electrification.