Talk to me about your summer plans

By Akash @ 2022-05-04T21:26 (+87)

TLDR: Please reach out to me if you are interested in improving the long-term future and want to discuss possible summer opportunities.

Background

You have about 1450 waking hours this summer. How are you going to spend them?

I've recently had some 1:1s with talented students who want to reduce x-risk. A few observations:

• I'm surprised by the number of people who don't yet have summer plans
• I'm even more surprised by the number of people who have a summer plan that doesn't improve the long-term future and doesn't help them skill-up. This is by their own lights-- as in, they themselves don't believe that their summer plans relate to their main values or career interests!
• I'm also surprised by the number of people who don't know about the wide action space of possibilities. (e.g., summer programs in EA hubs, opportunities to get funding to do independent research).
• Finally, I'm surprised by how many times a short conversation with me seems to have led someone to seriously consider changing how they spend their summer.

What I can do

If you want to improve the long-term future this summer, please reach out to me. Specific things I can do:

• Connect you with opportunities/people that you might not know about.
• Help you consider faster or more ambitious ways to spend your summer.
• Ask questions to help you consider wider action spaces

Specific things I will try not to do:

• Tell you what you should do over the summer.
• Make you feel guilty if you have considerations for how to spend the summer that go beyond maximizing the utility of the universe.

What to do if you're interested

Send me a message :

• Who you are
• What you think the world's biggest problems are (totally fine if you are uncertain!)
• What your current summer plan is
• Resume or Linkedin
• Miscellaneous information about your engagement with EA or your aptitudes (e.g., I completed an intro fellowship; I submitted a proposal to the ELK contest; I have an interest in operations aptitudes).

Please spend less than 5 minutes on this; I will ask you if I need more information.

Who should do this?

I expect I will be most helpful to people who are interested in longtermist movement-building and AI safety. I'm still happy to talk to people with other interests, though, and I'm also happy to connect them to others.

Caveats

I have never offered something like this via the forum before. I might decide to stop doing this, and I won't accept 100% of requests.

I am also not a career advisor. I'm just someone who asks questions, talks to people, and sometimes has thoughts about careers.