“Recovering from Rejection: My piece for the In-Depth EA Program” by Aaron Gertler

Formerly known as "Aaron's Epistemic Stories", which stops working as a title when it's on the Forum and people aren't required to read it.What is this post?A story about how I reacted poorly to my first few EA job rejections, and what I learned from reflecting on my mistakes.Context: When I worked at CEA, my colleague was working on EA Virtual Program curricula. She asked me to respond to this prompt:"What made you start caring about having good epistemics? What made you start trying to improve your epistemics? Why?"I wrote a meandering, stream-of-consciousness response and shared it. I assumed it would either be ignored or briefly summarized as part of a larger piece. Instead, it — went directly to the curriculum for the In-Depth Program?That was a surprise.[1] It was a much bigger surprise when people started reaching out to tell me how much it had helped them: maybe a dozen times over the last two years. From the emails alone, it seems to be the most important thing I've written.[2]So I'm sharing a lightly edited version on the Forum, in case it helps anyone else. Recovering from rejectionAfter I graduated from college, I took the most profitable job I could find, at a company in a cheap city. I wanted to save money so I could be flexible later. So far, so good.I started an EA group at the company, which kept me thinking about effective altruism on a regular basis even without my college group. It wasn’t nearly as fun to run as the college group — people who work full-time jobs don't like extra meetings, and my co-organizers kept getting other jobs and leaving. But I still felt like “part of EA”.Eventually, I decided to move on from the company. So I applied to GiveWell, got to the very last step of the application process… and got rejected.Well, I thought, I guess it makes sense that I’m not qualified for an EA job. My grades weren’t great, and I was never a big researcher in college. Time to do something else.(This is a story about a mistake. Do you see it?)I moved to San Diego and spent the next 18 months as a freelance tutor and writer, feeling generally dissatisfied with my life. My local group met rarely and far away; I had no car, I was busy with family stuff, and I became less and less engaged with EA.Through an old connection, I was introduced to a couple who ran an EA-aligned foundation and lived nearby. I ended up doing part-time operations work for them — reading papers, emailing charities with questions, and other EA-flavored stuff.This boosted my confidence and led me to think harder about my career, though I kept running into limitations. For example, GiveDirectly’s CEO wanted to hire a research assistant for his lab at UCSD, but I’d totally forgotten my old R classes and wasn’t a good candidate, despite having a great connection from my operations work. There goes maybe the best opportunity I’ll ever [...] --- First published: July 3rd, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NDRBZNc2sBy5MC8Fw/recovering-from-rejection-my-piece-for-the-in-depth-ea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.