I graduated school during the pandemic, and attending most of my undergraduate remotely, I didn’t have much chance to pursue research. I am now considering a Phd program but would like to do some research first to see if it’s something I really want to do. I haven’t had much success cold-emailing professors, many who are already overstretched and not willing to take on an outside student....
I’ve found from past work that I was able to enjoy my work the most when I had lots of autonomy, few distractions, and a role with great creative freedom. I’m now looking for a new job, but I find that most of my desired companies have open-offices, meetings throughout the day, and low prioritization for ‘deep work’, leaving little room for big ideas and creativity to flourish.How should I...
As for the future, perhaps a bit brazen, but I’m confident that other shells will introduce the core feature of nu in the near future to stay competitive. I can see fish having a “||” operator and rewrites of a few gnu functions to achieve what nu does natively.
I think this is strongly associated with effective altruism; It would be helpful to start with the very basic things you could do to improve the lives of others: volunteering at local food banks, teaching in places without suboptimal education, donating to reliable organizations, e.g., but since you have a highly valuable skill (you presumably have a high paying job), comparative advantage would suggest to apply your technical skills towards social good.
It would be a good idea to start by identifying problems in the world, at a macroscopic scale. The UN Sustainable Development goals would be a strong place to start. Dive into a problem, learn it’s intricacies, and figure why it cannot be resolved. We’re usually not limited by resources, but rather our allocation of these (I read somewhere that 30% of food grown is not eaten). If the limitation is something that can be lessened with technology (e.g not politics, insufficient resources, or other non-intervenable factors), then it simply comes down to creating a solution or to join an organization with an idea, but needs help.
If you find something, please do reach out. This is also something I’m searching for.