Maximising EAG value as a student

0. Key Info

TL;DR: Most students get <20% of the potential value of EAG due to poor/ insufficient preparation. Students should ideally spend 15-20 hours (4-6 absolute minimum) identifying career uncertainties, creating concrete options, setting SMART goals, then booking and prepping 15+ meetings around those goals.

Epistemic status: This guidance is based on what has worked well for me in my ~5 EAG attendances as a student. I have 80% that ~80% students will benefit from following all the steps, but if you've spent 20+ minutes on a step and it's not proving valuable, you should move on!

Two caveats: 

• Rough draft: I spent a total of 1.5hrs writing this: I wish I could polish and expand on my thinking more, but I wanted to post sufficiently before EAG so that people have the time to actually use it!
• Timing constraints: With EAG in 10 days, the full 15-20 hour prep may be unrealistic now. Do what you can for this EAG, but bookmark this for future conferences where you'll have more lead time.

1. Motivation behind this doc

If done right, time spent at EAG is likely to be the highest value/hour professional time in your life-to-date. You have the opportunity to get personalised advice from extremely senior and capable people. However, I claim that the majority of students who attend EAG reap less than 20% of the value they could receive from the event, mostly down to a lack of prepping. Booking a few meetings with people who 'seem cool' and asking them broadly about their job is not going to be very helpful for you.

Instead, you should spend at least as much time prepping EAG as you spend attending: ~15-20 hours. This doc lays out my recommended steps for how students should prep for EAG. Here is my template document to prep from, but I recommend reading this fully before starting!

2. The Steps

Time-constrained? loosely weight the following sections at the ratio: 2:1:1:2:2:2. However, I suspect many people will not follow my time recommendations: I strongly encourage you to carve time to spend longer than you think following these steps!

2.1 Identify uncertainties and make a best-guess (2-4hrs)

Right now, when you think about your career, it's probably looking pretty foggy. There are a few loose domains you're excited about, maybe you have a few specific roles in mind. You might have done an internship or part-time job, and maybe you think you've got a good idea of your strengths and weaknesses^[1].

However, spending time thinking about where your uncertainties lie will be invaluable for structuring the conversations you have. This will involve some personal reflection and writing. Maybe you want to supplement this by filling out 80k's career guide, having an advising call with 80k or Probably Good, or using the forum to find rubrics of career planning^[2]. What is important here is to come away from your reflection with a list of 5+ uncertainties about your career.

Once you have this, I recommend making a best guess at each of them. E.g., if you're uncertain about whether you will gain sufficient career capital to move into your desired job by staying in your current one, make a guess. Do this for each of your uncertainties, until you have at least 5+ claims. E.g., I think that staying in my current role for 6 months will give me the career capital I need to get a X position at Y company. You can be extremely uncertain about each of them, but I want you to come down on one side of the fence or the other, at least for now.

2.2 Know what potential options you have for how to spend your time (1-2hrs)

Often people ask people at EAG what they should do next. However, the person they're asking will often have very little information about them, and won't be able to give good advice. However, if you present them with 2-5 options of next steps: e.g., take this course, volunteer for this org, increase time spent doing Y thing you're already doing etc, they can help you prioritise. If you have no idea, then it will be hard for them to give you advice. A good way I've found for how to think about how I should spend my time is the steps I can take to resolve my uncertainties (that you created in the above section).

2.3 Create a skeleton of career options (1-2hrs)

Longer-term career planning is really hard. However, it will be useful to have in mind a few longer-term options to help structure your EAG chats. You should have a list of 2-5+ options that you can imagine yourself doing, and for each one, you should list why you think you could be a good fit for it, and why you think it is one of the best options for you and for the world.

2.4 Create goals (1-2hrs)

Now you should have a list of:

• 2-5 uncertainties, with your best guess of what the answer is
• 2-5 ways to be spending your time at the moment
• 2-5 longer-term career options

From this, you should be able to create 2-5 main goals for EAG. E.g., I'd like to plan out how I should be spending my next three months with week-by-week goals, I'd like to get an answer on X or Y uncertainty such that I can rule out/in X or Y career option. You should spend time ensuring that your goals are SMART - use an LLM to help you.

I'd loosely recommend weighting these goals based on which are most important. E.g., goal 1 is my most important, making up 40% of my priority, goals 2, 3 and 4 are equally important but less than goal 1, making up 20% each.

2.5 Send meeting requests (2-4hrs)

I'd recommend sending 25-40 meeting requests, with a goal of having at least 15 1-1 meetings^[3]. I know people (myself included) who have had upwards of 30 - this can be valuable if you're optimising for a broad set of opinions, or if you're good at staying energised for a while, but I'd guess that around 20 is a better number. You should send these meeting requests based on your goals, and if you made a percentage priority, you might want to get the ratios to match!

2.6 Prep those meetings! (2-4hrs)

I'd guess that you want to spend ~15-25m prepping each meeting. I'd recommend looking at their linkedin, their swapcard profile, and potentially their org website, and using an LLM to help you come up with questions that get at your goals.

One thing I've found very helpful in the past is showing them my uncertainties/ options etc and asking them whether they agree or what they'd endorse the most. This lets them talk about what they feel strongest about. However, this isn't sufficient to take up the whole meeting, you should have questions too! I'd recommend having one big google doc. Here's my template.

3. Quick Tips for making the most of EAG

• Ask for the best way to contact someone post-EAG - people are awful at responding on swapcard, so getting their email/ phone number is helpful.
• Book another call in your meeting, if you think it would be valuable.
• Have an ongoing list of to-do's that you can easily add to
• Make sure to not have more than 4 meetings back to back - you'll get knackered
• Try to have all your meetings in the same place
• Keep a list of who you've requested and who's accepted etc: swapcard can be confusing with this!
• Try come to the weekend not in sleep debt: it will be much harder if you're already tired
•  

4. Wrap-up the meetings, make plans, set deadlines (1-3hrs)

It can be easy to attend EAG, have a load of cool ideas in your head, and lose them all when you get back to uni! I'd recommend taking at least an hour, but potentially up to three, to review your notes from the meetings. Create to-dos with deadlines. Maybe you want to ask a friend (or even someone at EAG) if they can hold you accountable in someway. Sometime you might have chatted to someone at EAG about a follow-up - message them and schedule in these calls.

1. ^{^}

    For what it's worth, I think this is very unlikely. I had almost two years of full-time, office-based work experience when I started at CEA. I wrote a document of my strengths and weaknesses, and looking back, it was nonsense! I had no idea haha

2. ^{^}

    Worth noting that 80k focuses specifically on AI safety now and that both of these require an application.

3. ^{^}

    A colleague of mine mentioned that this might be quite ambitious, especially for first-time attendees! If this isn't realistic for you, then i recommend prioritising quality over quantity! Please don't over-anchor on this number and preparation or in-person energy suffer as a result!