High-Impact Careers for Mathematicians (Online Workshop by EA Cambridge)
At Effective Altruism Cambridge we are organising an online careers workshop, specifically designed for maths students who might be interested in doing something useful with their quantitative skills.
Full info is on the Facebook event https://fb.me/e/2di6G25gC and in the registration form https://forms.gle/31ovA6XWtriWXLwx5, but in short:
No prior knowledge of EA is assumed, so a very short introduction to EA, in particular to the 80,000 Hours framework, will be given at the start
Talks + Q&As on different career paths that use maths by 4 external speakers (all were maths majors):
- Neel Nanda covering AI Safety
Oliver Crook covering Quantitative Biology
Hazel Browne (MIT Economics PhD student) covering Global Priorities Research
Callum McDougall (Jane Street trader) covering Earning to Give in Quant Finance
No need to be a maths student or a Cambridge student.
We expect most of the impact to come from introducing EA to students with little prior familiarity with EA. However, on the margin, it would also be helpful to those more familiar with EA, since they would benefit from the interaction speaker that they might otherwise not get. Hence, if you run an EA student group, it’d be amazing if you could share it; or if you’re a student in a quantitative subject sharing in subject uni-wide group chats would be really high value.
In the past, we’ve had really great feedback on these (we run two similar ones last academic year): achieving a 3~fold increase in sign-ups, attendance and retention compared to our general career workshops.
It may well be the last time in a while that it makes sense for us to run these (most Cambridge maths students will have already had a chance to attend one), especially online (as there is less interest for online events now).
P.S:
-If you may be interested in running a similar workshop at your university, please get in touch.
-If you may be interested in speaking in future similar workshops, please do really get in touch.
-After the workshop, I will write a follow-up post (here or on the EA forum) about our experience running these, since I think other groups should run similar ones.
You say all speakers are former math undergraduates, but you also say that Callum MacDougall is a 4th year math undergraduate. This may be a mistake.
Thank you for your comment, it’s much appreciated! Technically, you’re right. But Callum is studying an integrated master (along with external students from did their undergrad at other universities who take the course as a stand-alone master), so even though he is formally an undergrad (for fee purposes), he could have graduated last summer with a BA last summer (like Neel did in 2020). If you’d like more information check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_III_of_the_Mathematical_Tripos
or don’t hesitate to ask me further.