I first encountered EA in late 2022 and in the summer of 2023 joined the Intro EA Virtual Program as my first real exposure to EA concepts and the EA community.
Over those weeks in the course, diving into different EA topics, ideas and thoughts and getting to discuss them with my facilitator and fellow attendees, my connection to it grew.
As personal background I will share that I began feeling a desire to help the world around 2014, soon after finishing undergrad. This desire first pushed me to start volunteering for local organizations in small efforts, such as picking up trash in neighborhoods, assisting non profits with various manual labor type tasks and mentoring young adults. But those activities didn’t satisfy my need. I tried a different strategy, which involved me changing careers to becoming a teacher and thereby getting to help others directly through education, and acquiring purposeful and family supporting careers. That worked for a few years, but afterwards I realized that it wasn’t satisfying in every way I needed. The impact as a teacher was very individual, and thereby minimal in a grand scheme. I however, felt pushed to help in a greater scale.
I think that’s one of the main reasons EA calls to me. It’s about helping the world, and it looks at not just my town, but the world, not just those alive now, but in the future too.
From a professional perspective my background is in engineering, program management, logistics, operations & consulting in the Aerospace, Defense and Manufacturing industries. I have also worked in Higher Education focused on training and workforce development.
In Spring 2023 I decided to take some time in the upcoming summer to figure out what I would like the next professional chapter of my life to be in order to do something that had that global impact. I was undeniably a bit rudderless, but what ended up giving me direction was learning more about EA. With that extra time in the summer I was able to commit and attend the intro program. Since the program ended I also attended my first EA conference (EAGxNYC) last month and met, interacted and connected with altruists in person for the very first time. (It was a great event and experience)
The net effect is that I am now committed to shifting my career towards high impact and EA related work.
Awesome thank for the links and thoughts. I have actually been debating applying to the s risk fellowship, but with your mention finally applied.
Agreed that the big picture falls under the human alignment / malicious human use. It’s likely the area which has been more researched historically, and I need to delve deeper into it. I’ve been putting off being more involved in LessWrong, but I will now make an account there as well with your highlight.
Thank you