Thanks a lot for the encouragement! You'd certainly be right with that haha, but I am gladly willing to guide my degree choice along different lines for it to be more effective.  Perhaps I subscribe a bit too much too 'tabula rasa' thinking haha but I've tended to get passionate about whatever I spend a lot of time on.

Hey there!

First of all, I want to thank you for this extremely extensive and well-thought out message, this is extremely helpful, thank you very much! As for the university, with the degree that I will have the ETH Zurich makes most sense, which is the furthest one can go in the country unfortunately. 

Ahh yes the Andrew Ng course is great, I'm still on it but that's a great idea, and I'll check out the  OpenAI course as well! 

I also want to thank you a lot for your thoughts on degree choice (also in the context of AI safety), that was my first priority to figure out - and your thoughts on that were very helpful. 

The note on global priorities research was also really interesting! That was actually a really good point, for some reason I had written GPR off in my mind, but it is actually a great idea. Perhaps the proximity to Geneva and EU citizenship may be useful in that regard

I've only just started digging into this post because it is so rich, so I will definitely be checking out more!

Hey there, new to the forum!

I'm leaving highschool next year here and am wondering about what to study at uni to have a higher impact. For context, I live (and would like to stay for the foreseeing future) near Zurich Switzerland. I highly enjoy math and physics (though anything that's quite analytical is pretty fun) , but also program a bit in my free time for fun. As such, I wanted to study mathematics and perhaps go into mathematical physics, but I am aware it is not as impactful as is perhaps possible. AI risk seems like a very interesting topic, but most research seems to happen in the US - and requires a degree in informatics, something I'm not too sure yet whether it is my cup of tea (perhaps I'm a bit too much of an ivory tower math enthusiast ^^). In any case, I highly enjoy most things that are very 'intellectually' stimulating and also difficult.

Would anyone have any recommendations for someone in this state of life - perhaps in terms of study choices or where to go from here? Thanks a lot in advance and looking forward to snooping around on the forum!