I recently started a full-time position at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, and I’ve been reflecting on how convoluted and indirect my path 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 because it helps correct 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 truncated sense of what 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. I majored in political science, where I found the work reasonably enjoyable and easy.^[1] Most of my friends ended up getting PhDs and I went the same direction: a classic case of peer effects.

Stage 2 (2010-2013): Trying other paths for a few years

As a college senior, I thought that 21 was a bit young to start a PhD, so I did other stuff for a while:

An Americorps program where I worked as a teacher’s aide in a kindergarten classroom in D.C.
Taught English in Thailand to middle and high schoolers
A two-semester internship at a think tank at which I produced approximately zero output.

I wanted to see if any job seemed like a better fit than”professor at Swarthmore/Middlebury/Pomona/etc.,” but nothing seemed more compelling, so I applied to PhD programs in political science in fall 2012^[2] and enrolled at Columbia the following year.

Stage 3 (2013-2015): Grad school is not a good fit

My first year in graduate school was very challenging and not at all like college. I took survey courses with giants in the field and struggled to pay attention. The required stats classes were interesting but required skills I didn’t really have; I thought I was picking up enough to get by, but I wasn’t, a fact I was alerted to when I got a letter from the department chair saying that my academic performance was not meeting expectations.

I did however, fall in with a dyed-in-the-wool experimentalist as my advisor who I really like and with whom I’m still friends. I took a few classes with him and we had some projects I was excited about. However, when people in the department looked at these projects, they sometimes asked: how is this political science?

At the end of my second year, I failed my comprehensive exams in American Politics. At the beginning of what would have been my third year, I failed them again, this time in both American and Comparative politics. That meant leaving the program and venturing into the real world. (I got a consolation M.A.)

Stage 4 (2016-2017): Transitioning to tech

This was a difficult period in my life. My first job, at a well-regarded international development NGO, fell apart after a few months.^[3] At that point, I felt like something was profoundly wrong with me and no job would ever work out.

One morning in spring 2016, I ran with my advisor and explained the situation, and he offered to pay me for the summer to work on a project that we had started in grad school: a meta-analysis of intergroup contact experiments. I gratefully said yes and we ultimately published the paper in 2018.

Meanwhile, I tried to get a job in tech, because that was what one did back then. In fall 2016, I got an unpaid internship at a friend’s startup and a paid gig practicing English conversation with Japanese employees of a big bank. I checked Hacker News every day, and in early 2017, applied to a job posting there to be a junior developer advocate, a title I’d never previously heard of, at a startup. I started that position in March 2017.

Stage 5 (2017-2021): The tech years

I worked at that company until early March 2020. Towards the end, I knew things weren’t going to work out,^[4] and I looked for an offramp. I ended up working with my former co-authors as a research assistant on a meta-analysis they were working on. I also moved back in with my parents in the suburbs and, when not working on the meta-analysis, collected unemployment. I was 31 at the time.

As that project winded down, I began interviewing to be a data analyst at a Fintech startup. I started that job in September 2020 and lasted about 9 months, but I was badly depressed at the time and an underperformer. In April 2021, the day I got my first COVID vaccine, I decided to resign—thereby saving the company the hassle of firing me, which I think bosses generally appreciate—and to take a long hike to clear my head.

Stage 6: (2021): The Appalachian Trail

I wrote about this here.

Stage 7 (2021-2024): freelancing, one final hurrah in tech, and freelancing again

After hiking the AT, I went to New Orleans for a family event, and while walking around the Bywater, felt the city calling to me; so I got a lease on a bedroom in a former BnB and explored the city for 5 months while doing a little freelance work for an insurance company and a wealth management firm. (I got both gigs through family connections.)

Eventually I started to run out of money and felt like it was time to get a real job again. The week after Mardi Gras, I saw a job ad on Hacker News that that looked appealing. I joined that company in May 2022 and moved back to NYC shortly after.^[5]

Throughout this period, I worked on and off on a meta-analysis of interventions intended to reduce sexual violence (as a hobby) with a team based in Princeton. Here is a write-up.

In summer 2023, I sensed that my time at my employer was coming to an end, and I began looking for an offramp. (You might be sensing a pattern here.) In August, I went to EAGxNYC 2023 and met some cool people, including someone who works at ASAP, and we began a project looking into interventions that try to reduce consumption of meat and animal products. (Here is a writeup.) As part of that project, I emailed a group of researchers to ask if I had missed any studies—in the lingo of meta-analysis, I canvassed the invisible college—and one of those people was Maya Mathur. It turned out that she sometimes used the paper I worked on in summer 2016 in her teaching and also in a textbook she’s co-author on. We met in person in January 2024, began working together shortly thereafter on a contract basis, and as of now I am a research scientist at her lab.

What did I learn?

In case this wasn’t clear, I typically have no idea what I’m doing doing or where I’m going. But things have turned out ok. Sometimes I feel like I just got lucky/being a privileged person helped me fail up. But perhaps I’ve learned some things anyway.

When things went well, it was usually because something caught my attention in a hard, biting way and I became obsessed with it. These were not projects I undertook for instrumental reasons; I usually have no clue what doors are ahead of me or where I’m going. But doors open anyway.
I’ve sometimes heard that you should aim to work for people who are where you want to be. I’d say instead that I work best for people whom I admire but whose positions I do not necessarily covet. I have never craved the stress of being a high-powered person. Lieutenant/batman is a better fit.
Rejection, even a really big one, is not necessarily the final word. I went to grad school to be a researcher, and eventually I got there.
When future employers ask why you left a company, if it was a startup, this story tends to work: “the company grew/changed a lot over the course of my time there, and it stopped being a strong culture/mission fit. So I left to work on other projects.” But for that line to work, you need to have projects.
Nick Bostrom remarks in Superintelligence that we have no idea if happiness is optimal for productivity. Perhaps instead “a sullen or anxious fixation on simply getting on with the job without making mistakes will be the productivity-maximizing attitude in most lines of work.” And indeed when I get a bee in my bonnet, I’m generally not happy about it. ‘Annoyed’ is closer to the mark. But that’s apparently the motivation I need for really detail-oriented data work, and doing that kind of work has opened doors. So I guess I’d ask of anyone who asked me about career matters: does anything really grind your gears? Is there a project you can make out of that? Do you have something you want to say? And not to worry so much about what will come of it. Start by doing work you’re invested in, that you’re proud of, and people may notice. Actually doing a project—executing it from start to finish—is generally the best way you can signal that you’re agentic.

My circuitous, undirected path to an EA job