[was a manager at MATS until recently and want to flesh out the thing Buck said a bit more]
It’s common for researchers to switch subfields, and extremely common for MATS scholars to get work doing something different from what they did at MATS. (Kosoy has had scholars go on to ARC, Neel scholars have ended up in scalable oversight, Evan’s scholars have a massive spread in their trajectories; there are many more examples but it’s 3 AM.)
Also I wouldn’t advise applying to something that seems interesting; I’d advise applying for literally everything (unless you know for sure you don’t want to work with Neel, since his app is very time intensive). The acceptance rate is ~4 percent, so better to maximize your odds (again, for most scholars, the bulk of the value is not in their specific research output over the 10 week period, but in having the experience at all).
Also please see Ryan’s replies to Tsvi on the talent needs report for more notes on the street lighting concern as it pertains to MATS. There’s a pretty big back and forth there (I don’t cleanly agree with one side or the other, but it might be useful to you).
[was a manager at MATS until recently and want to flesh out the thing Buck said a bit more]
It’s common for researchers to switch subfields, and extremely common for MATS scholars to get work doing something different from what they did at MATS. (Kosoy has had scholars go on to ARC, Neel scholars have ended up in scalable oversight, Evan’s scholars have a massive spread in their trajectories; there are many more examples but it’s 3 AM.)
Also I wouldn’t advise applying to something that seems interesting; I’d advise applying for literally everything (unless you know for sure you don’t want to work with Neel, since his app is very time intensive). The acceptance rate is ~4 percent, so better to maximize your odds (again, for most scholars, the bulk of the value is not in their specific research output over the 10 week period, but in having the experience at all).
Also please see Ryan’s replies to Tsvi on the talent needs report for more notes on the street lighting concern as it pertains to MATS. There’s a pretty big back and forth there (I don’t cleanly agree with one side or the other, but it might be useful to you).