“My circuitous, undirected path to an EA job” by Seth Ariel Green

Last week, I started a full-time position at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, and I’ve been reflecting a bit on how convoluted and indirect my path here was. I thought that journey might be worth sharing. In the genre of "Well, how did I get here?," I appreciate Johannes Haushofer's CV of failures for helping compensate for selection bias in career stories. If we only see the things that go right and the outcomes that emerge from them, we'll have a very truncated sense of what actually leads to what. So here's my story. Stage 1 (2006-2010): Aiming to be a political science professor I went to a small US college whose graduates are overrepresented in EA and in PhD programs. Most of my friends ended up getting PhDs and were pretty serious academically. I liked them, and I liked my professors, so I opted to board the [...] ---Outline:(00:38) Stage 1 (2006-2010): Aiming to be a political science professor(01:20) Stage 2 (2010-2013): Trying other paths for a few years(02:13) Stage 3 (2013-2015): Grad school is not a good fit(03:33) Stage 4 (2016-2017) Transitioning to tech(04:57) Stage 5 (2017-2021): The tech years(05:56) Stage 6: (2021): The Appalachian Trail(06:05) Stage 7 (2021-2024): freelancing, one final hurrah in tech, and freelancing again(07:54) I obviously never had a plan to get hereThe original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: July 6th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ekbCzxh2SfA64GrxD/my-circuitous-undirected-path-to-an-ea-job --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.