Hello

I am a second year student majoring in data science at UTAS, who is current planning his third year project in effective altruism. In essence, I have been inspired by characters such as Angus Deaton, Bjorn Lomborg, and many EA writers to pursue research in international spending. To simplify, there is a lot of money which is spent really poorly, and lots of areas with high cost-benefit ratios which are underfunded, and my plan is to take Australia's foreign budget spending, map that onto a data visualisation program, and then identify the poor investments which may be better spent elsewhere. The long-term goal is to map out the entire western worlds spending, but I am scaling that down whilst I am just starting the project. I want to extend this further for my honours and maybe a PhD, however my understanding for PhDs is that you have to work on a pre-existing project which may not necessarily jive with what I have planned. Does anyone have any recommendations as to how I should move forward with my project?

I should also mention, I have some potential business opportunities outside of this (i.e. career capital and high-impact graduate programs), and I am planning to make the most of them, so I will not necessarily be going straight from Honours to PhD. 

Thank you

Jack

P.S. I was told putting a photo in my profile would increase the likelihood people look at it. This post has nothing to do with kittens.