I’m sorry to hear you’ve been finding this tough. Career choice is really daunting, particularly if you think you might need to make a fairly big shift in the kind of work you do.
Foreign service roles sound sensible as both being high impact and requiring language skills. I wonder whether working for intergovernmental organisations like the UN or NATO might also be a good option. There doesn’t seem to have been much focus on those kinds of roles in effective altruism, but they seem really important for improving global governance.
Your idea of looking at job boards etc in other languages sounds sensible to me. It might be worth reaching out to some of the people doing community building in France or Germany for suggestions.
As to how important it is for you to get a better sense of what problems you think are most pressing: This generally seems pretty important to do earlier rather than later to me, because you can have so much more impact working on some problems than others. In your case, it also sounds as if it would be useful to get a focus for which types of organisations to start reaching out to and getting experience at. On the other hand, I also think it would be reasonable to decide that you’re unlikely to make headway at this, and it seems better to actually have a go at applying for some roles rather than spending more time agonising over whether there are even better ones to go for. You might find our career planning resources useful for thinking this through.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve been finding this tough. Career choice is really daunting, particularly if you think you might need to make a fairly big shift in the kind of work you do.
Foreign service roles sound sensible as both being high impact and requiring language skills. I wonder whether working for intergovernmental organisations like the UN or NATO might also be a good option. There doesn’t seem to have been much focus on those kinds of roles in effective altruism, but they seem really important for improving global governance.
Your idea of looking at job boards etc in other languages sounds sensible to me. It might be worth reaching out to some of the people doing community building in France or Germany for suggestions.
As to how important it is for you to get a better sense of what problems you think are most pressing: This generally seems pretty important to do earlier rather than later to me, because you can have so much more impact working on some problems than others. In your case, it also sounds as if it would be useful to get a focus for which types of organisations to start reaching out to and getting experience at. On the other hand, I also think it would be reasonable to decide that you’re unlikely to make headway at this, and it seems better to actually have a go at applying for some roles rather than spending more time agonising over whether there are even better ones to go for. You might find our career planning resources useful for thinking this through.
Doing more networking and chatting to people sounds great. You could consider going to an EA Global conference. You might also want to think about how you can reach out to organisations and quickly show them how you can provide value to them, perhaps by designing your own internship.