It’s been great to see and read through this thread. Any thoughts on my own situation would be especially appreciated.
I’m in my final year of PPE at Oxford with a focus on the more technical/quantitative parts of economics. I consider myself quite entrepreneurial and have for some time wanted to do something in that vein—broadly considered, to include e.g. charity entrepreneurship.
Affecting policy seems challenging because I’m not confident of my personal fit in academia or government bureaucracies. One of my new interests is in combining policy/‘systemic’ change with an entrepreneurial approach, so any suggestions here would be welcome. I’m motivated and willing to work hard; enjoy learning new things; and would like to do work that combines high impact, intensity, some level of intellectual challenge, and fairly fast feedback loops. I’m still unsure about my cause prioritisation. I like quantitative subjects and am mathematically competent but don’t think my comparative advantage lies in (purely) quantitative work.
Since I have more questions than I can answer now, while focused on my end-of-degree exams, I plan to take some time (9-12 months) after graduation to explore certain key questions and areas via independent study and internships/volunteering. I’ve got a full-time job offer at quite a prestigious strategy consulting firm, which it is very likely that I can defer until after that.
I want to use these 9-12 months as best I can and would like to hear anyone’s thoughts on how to do this. These could include:
Any lessons learned from your own experience of taking some time out to figure out plans
Advice you would give yourself if you were about to enter my shoes
Specific areas or questions you would recommend investigating / opportunities for internships (I am happy to send my CV by direct message)
Things I’m already going to do:
Planning beforehand roughly what I want to do and achieve (already started)
Time-boxing with hard limits & using accountability systems with friends
Making documents / presentations of my thought process to crystallise thoughts and make sure I land on at least some conclusions in time
Please also let me know if you’d be willing to chat about all this around June-time, when I’m figuring out plans for the time out more concretely :)
It sounds based on your description that a fairly straightforward step would be for you to try to set up calls with 1) someone on the Charity Entrepreneurship leadership team, and 2) some of the founders of their incubated charities. This would help you to evaluate whether it would be a good idea for you to apply to the CE program at some point, as well as to refine your sense of which aspects of entrepreneurship you’re particularly suited to (so that if entrepreneurship doesn’t work out—maybe you discover other aspects of it that seem less appealing—you’ll be able to look for the bits you care for in positions with more established organizations). If you came out of those calls convinced that you might want to apply to Charity Entrepreneurship down the road, it seems to me that a logical next step would be to start reading up on potential causes and interventions that you might want your charity to pursue. You could also, I’m sure, do volunteer work for existing, newly launched CE charities, where given that most of them only have two staff, you’d probably be given a fair amount of responsibility and would be able to develop useful insights into the entrepreneurial process. For you, the value of information from doing that seems like it might be quite high.
I’m not convinced charity entrepreneurship is for me, partly because I’m unsure whether it’s the most impactful thing I could do, but I think it would be great to get a better understanding of what they are doing.
The idea of volunteering with a newly launched CE charity is a very good one and not something I had thought of. Thank you!
Happy to help! Another thing that strikes me is that in my experience (which is in the U.S.), running an academic research team at a university (i.e., being the principal investigator on the team’s grants) seems to have a lot in common with running a startup (you have a lot of autonomy/flexibility in how you spend your time; your efficacy is largely determined by how good you are at coordinating other people’s efforts and setting their priorities for them; you spend a lot of time coordinating with external stakeholders and pitching your value-add; you have authority over your organization’s general direction; etc.). This seems relevant because I think a lot of the top university economics research groups in the U.S. have a pretty substantial impact on policy (e.g., consider Opportunity Insights), and the same may well be true in the U.K. It seems to me that other avenues toward impacting policy (e.g., working in the government or for major, established advocacy organizations) are considerably less entrepreneurial in nature. Of course, you could also found your own advocacy organization to push for policy change, but 1) I think it’s generally easier to get funding for research than for work along these lines (especially as a newcomer), in part because the advocacy space is already so crowded, and 2) founding an advocacy organization seems like the kind of thing one might do through Charity Entrepreneurship, which you seem less excited about. If you’re mainly attracted to entrepreneurship by tight feedback loops, however, academia is probably the wrong way to go, as it definitely does not have those.
Thank you for this idea. I should definitely think more about leading a research team.
I really don’t mean to say that I’m unenthusiastic about Charity Entrepreneurship; I’m just currently unsure whether it’s the very best thing to do. There are a lot of things that would very much appeal to me about CE, so I want to be sure not to jump into it too fast. (I think a lot depends on one’s moral position about the importance and tractability of shaping the long-term future, and this is something that I’m planning to spend time reading and thinking about during my time out.)
That makes perfect sense! I agree that CE probably isn’t the best fit for people most interested in doing EA work to mitigate existential risks. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you’d ever like to talk any of this through at greater length, but otherwise, it seems to me like you’re approaching these decisions in a very sensible way.
I am a former management / strategy consultant (3 years) and currently entrepreneur (4 years now) of which the last year in the EA space (leading EA Netherlands) . I think we have a very similar profile
Happy to talk to you in June, I will send you my email in a pm!
It’s been great to see and read through this thread. Any thoughts on my own situation would be especially appreciated.
I’m in my final year of PPE at Oxford with a focus on the more technical/quantitative parts of economics. I consider myself quite entrepreneurial and have for some time wanted to do something in that vein—broadly considered, to include e.g. charity entrepreneurship.
After reading a book over the summer that challenged my perspectives, I am considering a broader range of issues and careers than before (brain dump from then here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RnmsaX5TEDoaH6XcB/systemic-change-global-poverty-eradication-and-a-career-plan ). That post was just about development, but I’m also thinking more about longtermism and the other causes it suggests. It seems that to maximise my impact I should affect EA-meta or policy in some way.
Affecting policy seems challenging because I’m not confident of my personal fit in academia or government bureaucracies. One of my new interests is in combining policy/‘systemic’ change with an entrepreneurial approach, so any suggestions here would be welcome. I’m motivated and willing to work hard; enjoy learning new things; and would like to do work that combines high impact, intensity, some level of intellectual challenge, and fairly fast feedback loops. I’m still unsure about my cause prioritisation. I like quantitative subjects and am mathematically competent but don’t think my comparative advantage lies in (purely) quantitative work.
Since I have more questions than I can answer now, while focused on my end-of-degree exams, I plan to take some time (9-12 months) after graduation to explore certain key questions and areas via independent study and internships/volunteering. I’ve got a full-time job offer at quite a prestigious strategy consulting firm, which it is very likely that I can defer until after that.
I want to use these 9-12 months as best I can and would like to hear anyone’s thoughts on how to do this. These could include:
Any lessons learned from your own experience of taking some time out to figure out plans
Advice you would give yourself if you were about to enter my shoes
Specific areas or questions you would recommend investigating / opportunities for internships (I am happy to send my CV by direct message)
Things I’m already going to do:
Planning beforehand roughly what I want to do and achieve (already started)
Time-boxing with hard limits & using accountability systems with friends
Making documents / presentations of my thought process to crystallise thoughts and make sure I land on at least some conclusions in time
Please also let me know if you’d be willing to chat about all this around June-time, when I’m figuring out plans for the time out more concretely :)
Thank you very much!
It sounds based on your description that a fairly straightforward step would be for you to try to set up calls with 1) someone on the Charity Entrepreneurship leadership team, and 2) some of the founders of their incubated charities. This would help you to evaluate whether it would be a good idea for you to apply to the CE program at some point, as well as to refine your sense of which aspects of entrepreneurship you’re particularly suited to (so that if entrepreneurship doesn’t work out—maybe you discover other aspects of it that seem less appealing—you’ll be able to look for the bits you care for in positions with more established organizations). If you came out of those calls convinced that you might want to apply to Charity Entrepreneurship down the road, it seems to me that a logical next step would be to start reading up on potential causes and interventions that you might want your charity to pursue. You could also, I’m sure, do volunteer work for existing, newly launched CE charities, where given that most of them only have two staff, you’d probably be given a fair amount of responsibility and would be able to develop useful insights into the entrepreneurial process. For you, the value of information from doing that seems like it might be quite high.
Thank you very much for these suggestions.
I’m not convinced charity entrepreneurship is for me, partly because I’m unsure whether it’s the most impactful thing I could do, but I think it would be great to get a better understanding of what they are doing.
The idea of volunteering with a newly launched CE charity is a very good one and not something I had thought of. Thank you!
Happy to help! Another thing that strikes me is that in my experience (which is in the U.S.), running an academic research team at a university (i.e., being the principal investigator on the team’s grants) seems to have a lot in common with running a startup (you have a lot of autonomy/flexibility in how you spend your time; your efficacy is largely determined by how good you are at coordinating other people’s efforts and setting their priorities for them; you spend a lot of time coordinating with external stakeholders and pitching your value-add; you have authority over your organization’s general direction; etc.). This seems relevant because I think a lot of the top university economics research groups in the U.S. have a pretty substantial impact on policy (e.g., consider Opportunity Insights), and the same may well be true in the U.K. It seems to me that other avenues toward impacting policy (e.g., working in the government or for major, established advocacy organizations) are considerably less entrepreneurial in nature. Of course, you could also found your own advocacy organization to push for policy change, but 1) I think it’s generally easier to get funding for research than for work along these lines (especially as a newcomer), in part because the advocacy space is already so crowded, and 2) founding an advocacy organization seems like the kind of thing one might do through Charity Entrepreneurship, which you seem less excited about. If you’re mainly attracted to entrepreneurship by tight feedback loops, however, academia is probably the wrong way to go, as it definitely does not have those.
Thank you for this idea. I should definitely think more about leading a research team.
I really don’t mean to say that I’m unenthusiastic about Charity Entrepreneurship; I’m just currently unsure whether it’s the very best thing to do. There are a lot of things that would very much appeal to me about CE, so I want to be sure not to jump into it too fast. (I think a lot depends on one’s moral position about the importance and tractability of shaping the long-term future, and this is something that I’m planning to spend time reading and thinking about during my time out.)
That makes perfect sense! I agree that CE probably isn’t the best fit for people most interested in doing EA work to mitigate existential risks. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you’d ever like to talk any of this through at greater length, but otherwise, it seems to me like you’re approaching these decisions in a very sensible way.
Hi there,
I am a former management / strategy consultant (3 years) and currently entrepreneur (4 years now) of which the last year in the EA space (leading EA Netherlands) . I think we have a very similar profile
Happy to talk to you in June, I will send you my email in a pm!
Sounds great! Thank you very much :)