Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My Career Decision-Making Process , published by ShayBenMoshe on the Effective Altruism Forum. Summary In this post I share my career decision-making process. I hope that it will help others in their career decisions, by serving as a detailed case study. I believe that the general framework I used can be useful to a wide audience. Furthermore, in the last section (which comprises more than half of the post), I detail all of the options that I considered, many of which are not frequently discussed in EA, and I believe they will be particularly relevant for people with technological or scientific background. I encourage all community members to share their career decision-making process as well. About half a year ago, I left my math PhD to pursue a more impactful career. In the past few months, I was working on generating a long-list of options, learning more about them and making a decision. Ultimately, I decided to start a PhD in computational healthcare, aiming to work on neglected areas in the healthcare system (in developed countries) and employ tools that are not commonly used in healthcare. I tried (and failed) to keep this post short. If you want more details on anything, don't hesitate to reach out (by a comment, private message, email [shaybm9@gmail.com] or any other method). I have also tried (and hopefully succeeded) to write it so that each section can be read independently, according to the reader's interests. Table of Contents Goals of this Post My Background Preferences and Constraints Methodology Narrowing Down the Long-List Making a Final Decision Final Plan General Helpful Resources Options Considered Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to thank Edo Arad for numerous conversations that were instrumental in my process, for connecting me to my new PhD advisor, and for carefully reading this post. I would also like to thank Nadav Brandes, Omri Sheffer, Shahar Lahad, Sella Nevo and Gidon Kadosh for their valuable feedback on this post. This post does not necessarily reflect their views, and all mistakes are mine. 1. Goals of this Post There are several reasons for me writing this post, I wish to emphasize the main one - I want more people to write posts like this one. They don't have to be as detailed, don't have to follow the same format, and don't have to discuss the same aspects. Many of us are making career decisions at one point or another, and I believe that it will be extremely valuable to the community to have many detailed and diverse case studies. In particular, I hope this and other people's posts will serve the following purposes: Learn from each other's methodologies. We can learn how others generate ideas and figure out which of them are best for their purposes. In my experience, the material on 80,000 hours' website is very helpful, but I felt that it lacks concrete examples of making career choices. I hope we can fill this gap together. Share vague and concrete career options, our take on them, and references to read more about them. Get to know more people in the community who are (at least somewhat) interested in career paths we are interested in. Share our struggle and frustration in this journey. 2. My Background tl;dr - I'm Shay Ben Moshe, 26 years old from Israel. I have a BSc and an MSc in mathematics, and I have worked as a programmer and cyber-security researcher for about 10 years. I have been involved in the EA community for the past 4 years, and I recently decided to leave my math PhD after one year in (out of five), to pursue a more EA-aligned career. I started programming when I was in high school - I worked as a freelance web developer (doing both front- and back-end). At the age of 18 I joined the Israel Defense Forces (mandatory) for 5 years, where for the most part I served as a cyber-security researcher, and in the last y...