Love this post and would love to see more like it on the forum! Congrats on a successful EA Student Summit.

I especially want to emphasize this:

there are so many EAs who would genuinely like to talk to you.

In my experience, EAs are almost always super willing to provide advice to others within the EA movement, often because they're nice people, but also because they get to help you have an impact, which helps them have an impact, so everybody wins!

As a single data point, nothing makes my day more than getting emails from random EAs. :)

I think that it is very well written, neatly organized and clear. You clearly state your actual belief in what you claim and you give good references. Also, the tone is friendly and fun to read :) 

Definitely encourage you to write more!

For me, the most useful part of the student summit was less the actual information, and more the opportunity to meet and talk to other EAs. I'm actually really happy that the summit was virtual this year because that lowered the cost significantly and made me more willing to attend.

Thanks for writing, I really enjoyed reading this and it makes me feel happy that you found the EA Student Summit so valuable! :) 

Thanks for this post Akash, I found it really interesting to read. I definitely agree with your point about how friendly EAs can be when you reach out to them. I think this is something I've been aware of for a while, but it still takes me time to internalise and make myself more willing to reach out to people. But it's definitely something I want to push myself to do more, and encourage other people to do. No one is  going to be unhappy about someone showing an interest in their work and ideas!

This is genuinely a fantastic article with amazing takeaways. I plan to bookmark this and show this to future EAs.

Anecdotally, a lot of student EAs felt like they don’t really know what to do, and they’re not fully satisfied with the career options that are out there. People who aren’t interested in the “hot” EA topics (e.g., AI safety, longtermism) seemed especially unsure about what to do, or even if they “could” pursue a career within EA. 

We (the Local Career Advice Network) noticed this phenomenon when research career advice bottlenecks in EA community, and have termed it "Personal Uncertainty" (see here)

I think definitely applies to non-student EAs as well (also anecdotally!) and could be caused by a lot of different factors including different cause area interests, a lack of freedom of movement to the US/UK and lack of flexible career capital. 

Hi Akash, great post. 
The link to the Nanda post isn't working. (It links back to your post)

for more about the benefits of blogging, see this post by Neel Nanda