You’ve had a chance to carefully consider several topics in the Fellowship. Hopefully, you’ve had some useful discussions and cleared up some of your cause prioritization. This week’s exercise will focus on identifying these updates and translating them into useful next steps which you can work on alongside the other fellows in your cohort. By the end of this exercise, you should have a list of possible next steps which you can bring to the last session and prioritize.
First, it’s worth explicitly writing down any insights you’ve had over the fellowship. If you took notes you could go over them now. Try to spend time generating thoughts by setting a 5-minute timer for each week. Focus on finding open questions as well as beliefs you have about the topic.
Go through each week of the fellowship identifying any insights you might have had or seen other people have. Including, new thoughts, questions raised, or a clearer understanding of something you already knew. We’ve included some prompts below to help you. (30 min.)
****What were the main claims made by the reading this week as you understand them?
Do you agree with these main claims?
Whether you agree or disagree, what is your crux? What might change your mind or help you prove your position?
How should you act given your beliefs on the topic? What does it suggest is more important to work on than you might have otherwise thought?
Were any points made by other fellows which you didn’t understand or agree with?
Are there any claims about this topic that you confidently believe in?
Keep this list of insights in mind for the rest of the exercise but don’t feel the need to refer only to that. You might already have beliefs about the best opportunities to do good before the Fellowship which you could use to generate next steps.
Updating your cause prioritization will lead to some new career uncertainties. 80,000 Hours has resources on making career decisions, a key ideas page, and some problem profiles which we can use to generate some next steps. These next steps might be different depending on whether you have no career plan at all, a couple of open options, or a very specific trajectory but there should be new areas to investigate regardless of your situation.
Generate some next steps for your career plan. Maybe this is starting a career plan, or making some progress on a career decision, or applying to open positions. Decide on 4-5 actions you could take and bring them to the session to prioritise. We’ve included some examples below but these are more general, your next steps will be specific to you.
****Apply to an internship
Work through the 80k career planning page
Do some research on my main options
Do some cheap tests to test my fit for some promising options
We’ll hold a career planning discussion group after the fellowship for people to meet and plan their careers. You can sign up here and ask your session facilitator for more details.