Sorry for being a bit slow to respond. I have been thinking about your question on how the EA community can be more supportive in situations I experienced, but struggled to come up with answers I feel particularly confident in. I might circle back to this question at a later point.
For now, I am going to answer instead what I suspect would have made me feel better supported while I was struggling to figure out what I should be doing, but I don’t feel particularly confident:
i) Mentorship. Having a soundboard to talk through my decisions (and possibly letting me know that I was being silly when I felt like I wasn’t allowed to make my own decisions) might have helped a lot.
ii) Having people acknowledge that I maneuvered myself into a position that wasn’t great from the perspective of expected impact, and that this all kind of sucked.
That said, for the latter one, the bottleneck might have been me. I had quite a few people who I thought knew me well express surprise at how miserable I felt at the time, so apparently this was not as obvious as I thought.
I would expect my first suggestion to generalise, mentorship is likely very useful for a lot of people!
I had a lot of contact with local and global EAs, and without that I probably would have done worse. I particularly appreciated people’s support when I was actually applying to ‘real jobs’ last year. Both when I was trying to decide whether I should accept a low-ball offer from a tech startup (which I rejected) as well as the wide support I received from civil servants in how to navigate the civil service application process.
In the post I mentioned that I mentally distanced myself from EA a bit, but I wouldn’t say that I distanced myself from EA. This was a purely mental shift in how I relate to the community and doing as much good as I can. Please don’t kick me out ;-)
Hi Michelle,
Sorry for being a bit slow to respond. I have been thinking about your question on how the EA community can be more supportive in situations I experienced, but struggled to come up with answers I feel particularly confident in. I might circle back to this question at a later point.
For now, I am going to answer instead what I suspect would have made me feel better supported while I was struggling to figure out what I should be doing, but I don’t feel particularly confident:
i) Mentorship. Having a soundboard to talk through my decisions (and possibly letting me know that I was being silly when I felt like I wasn’t allowed to make my own decisions) might have helped a lot.
ii) Having people acknowledge that I maneuvered myself into a position that wasn’t great from the perspective of expected impact, and that this all kind of sucked.
That said, for the latter one, the bottleneck might have been me. I had quite a few people who I thought knew me well express surprise at how miserable I felt at the time, so apparently this was not as obvious as I thought.
I would expect my first suggestion to generalise, mentorship is likely very useful for a lot of people!
I had a lot of contact with local and global EAs, and without that I probably would have done worse. I particularly appreciated people’s support when I was actually applying to ‘real jobs’ last year. Both when I was trying to decide whether I should accept a low-ball offer from a tech startup (which I rejected) as well as the wide support I received from civil servants in how to navigate the civil service application process.
In the post I mentioned that I mentally distanced myself from EA a bit, but I wouldn’t say that I distanced myself from EA. This was a purely mental shift in how I relate to the community and doing as much good as I can. Please don’t kick me out ;-)