Career Advice For College Students (And Other People, I Guess)
It’s EAG week, though I unfortunately am not going to make it up to Boston. Therefore, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled policy essays for some career advice.
I don’t entirely feel qualified to give career advice; I’m 33; I’m three years out of grad school; I have had one (1) real job. However, being 33 makes you an elder in effective altruist spaces, and so at every EAG and EAGx I attend, I am asked for career advice. And so, in the spirit of “if you have done a task more than twice, you should write a script to do it”, I’m writing down the career advice that I usually give.
1. Calm down. It’ll be OK.
Effective altruism - and other do gooder spaces - are full of extremely driven young people who want to have a Plan for their lives. They often feel like if they haven’t landed a job with the optimum ratio of career capital to direct work right out of college, they are doomed to failure and will never make an impact in the world.
This is not true. It is absolutely fine if you are unsure what to do and are not sure you’re making the right decisions when you are 19. It is absolutely fine if you are unsure what you want to do and not sure you’re making the right decisions when you’re 22. I… certainly have not discovered a secret source of certainty in my life by 33 either.
It is also both fine and normal to be rejected by things. Especially among EAs, there is often a sense that you must go to Harvard and found a highly impactful charity and also win friends and influence people if you are to be successful. This is… also not true.
I am, by EA standards, considered to be A Success; I worked at Open Philanthropy; I’ve given talks at EAGx; I have gotten EA grants. I… also have a completely incoherent career path1 and been rejected by more things than I can count. I’ve been rejected by so many things I can’t even write CV of failures because I cannot even keep track of them all.
Your life is not over because you didn’t get that internship. I’ve been on the other side of internship hiring decisions; we have very limited information and frankly, we are absolutely certain that we are missing talented candidates! Being rejected by a thing does not mean you are not good enough for that thing; it only means that the selection process was not optimized for you.
In some sense, this whole section is written for past me. When I graduated from college, I didn’t get into my top choice grad schools. I was convinced my career was over. When I decided I didn’t want to be a physicist, I was pretty sure I was going to never, ever get another job. I have been rejected so many times; it has always felt like I was teetering on the verge of Permanent Failure.2
In hindsight, I wish I had stressed less. Things work out for most people! Even if you secretly think that you are less talented than most people, this is… probably just imposter syndrome. You are, in fact, like most people.
It is normal to get rejected. If you are applying for selective things, it is virtually guaranteed you will get rejected. In fact, if you aren’t getting rejected for things, you should be trying for more selective and difficult things. Rejection is part of the process; it does not mean you are a failure. Keep trying; it’ll work out eventually.
2. Get mentors.
Knowing people who are older than you who do things you would like to do is… absolutely invaluable. Being able to call them up when you’re not sure what to do? Even better.
Mentorship can be formal, as in an academic advisor relationship. I have been lucky to work with some deeply caring and thoughtful academic advisors - Claire Adida, Agustina Paglayan3 and Gareth Nellis come to mind. But if you don’t feel like your academic adviser is a great fit - or even knows your name4 - that doesn’t mean you are out of mentorship opportunities.
Talk to people more senior than you on Twitter!5 I’ve… basically posted several people into being my friends. Talk to the people running your internship scheme! Some of them are probably cool. Is there someone whose work you really admire? Write them a cold email! Trust me, no one is ever sad to receive an email saying their work is cool.
Not all of these will pan out. Some people won’t reply; some people won’t have helpful advice. Like with #1 above, it’s a bit of a numbers game; you’ll probably have to talk to a fair number of people to find someone you really click with. But don’t feel guilty about that; you aren’t wasting people’s time asking for their advice. Every cool person you know with an impressive career also had to ask people for advice; it is… part of being a senior person in a field that you should talk to junior people.
Which brings me to:
3. Networking should be fun
Many people approach networking as a goal-based task. You are talking to Person X who might be able to hire you for Thing Y; if the interaction does not lead to being hired for Thing Y, it is a failure.
This is incorrect. The goal with networking is to meet lots of interesting people doing interesting things, and talk to them about the interesting things. If there happens to be a synergy where your skills match up with a need, that’s great! If there isn’t, well, you met a cool person and talked about interesting things!
This is also a much more pleasant mode of interaction for the other person in the conversation. Most of the time, a person probably cannot hire you for Thing Y, even if you are really cool and seem well-suited to it. There is usually an application and a process; in the interest of fairness, they probably can’t give you much information about the process besides what is public information; also it’s just awkward to have 1:1s where someone clearly wants you to offer them a job and you do not have the power to do this. It is, however, awesome to have 1:1s to discuss what things in a particular topic area are most interesting and why.
On a purely instrumental level, this is also a good networking strategy. A large number of “weak ties” (people you vaguely know who vaguely like you) does actually improve your job prospects. But I don’t give this advice for the instrumental reason.
I genuinely believe networking can and should be fun. At this point in my career, I don’t go to conferences to present work, or at least, I only partially go to present work. I go so I can hang out with interesting people and find out about the cool things they’re up to.
4. Intern if you can.
This item is basically for US college students; this advice may vary if you are in a different educational system or out of college. But: intern, intern, intern.6
There are several reasons to do this:
You get to try something new in a time-limited way. This can mean finding out about something you really love, but it can be equally valuable to find out about things you don’t want to do. When you find out during an internship that you hate a thing, you can recognize you gained that knowledge, move on and you never have to do it again.
The most valuable internship I did in my career was not interning at Open Phil - though that led to a full-time job. The most valuable internship I ever did was my sophomore year in college, when I worked in experimental physics, and tried my hand at designing a laser system, working with high voltage electronics, and working in vacuum.
It turns out I didn’t particularly enjoy those things. I loved being a computational physicist, but make me squint at a laser detection card for six hours a day, and I become very cranky.
Finding out that summer that I didn’t want to do those things spared me finding out that in grad school. In grad school, I would have to have started working with an experimental physicist, probably started outlining what my dissertation would be like, maybe I would have been added to a grant, etc. If I later decided I hated it, I would have to find a new adviser and start that whole process again, and depending on how my grad school funded students, leaving the lab could mean risking my income.
Instead, I went back to university after that summer, thanked my professor profusely for the experience, and simply did not become a physicist who did optics.
Internships are short and you can do a fair number of them in different fields.
It’s not uncommon to do three internships with three different companies in very different roles during university. Thus, in the course of three years, you do a degree but also get experience of three different jobs.
After university, it is not very practical to try a bunch of different jobs for three months and then decide at the end which one you liked best; it is generally advised to stick with jobs for at least a year. You waste a lot less time doing internships.
Internships are often designed to support your growth as an employee. They are not expecting you to come in on day 1 and know everything. Jobs… probably shouldn’t expect this either, but many of them do, so it’s better to get some of the Learning Experiences out of the way before you graduate.
On an extremely practical note: in college, you generally have health insurance provided by either your parents or your university. This is a great time to take risks, because you still have health insurance even if things go terribly.
I did an undergraduate degree and half a PhD in theoretical physics; I now work in international development.
My friends can affirm that I have spent a lot of time telling them that even though things do work out for most people, I am not most people, and therefore, it might not work out for me.
Pretty sure one of my undergrad advisers couldn’t pick me out of a lineup.
FWIW, if for some strange reason you came away from this post thinking “I want more advice from this person”, you can also DM or email me (lagilbert@gmail.com). Always happy to chat!
But do try to make sure you do paid internships if you can. Your labor is valuable; your employer should treat it as such.