Our Top Tips for Engineers at University
When I was approaching the end of my engineering degree, I struggled to reconcile my hopes for an impactful career with the realities of the job market. Here are some tips I’ve picked up that might help you get a leg up on your own high-impact career plan while still at university!
Fast-Track Learning
The content taught at university is unlikely to be that applicable to your future career (that was certainly true for me!), but the skills you learn are much more valuable. As a result, it might be a good idea to do as light a courseload as you can so that you can spend your free time exploring your interests, what you value, your cause prioritisation, what impact you want to have, making connections, and just general creative and deep thinking.
You don’t have to wait until you finish university to start applying these skills in an impactful way. You can start learning about impact now and start applying what you learn through side projects, independent research, volunteering, etc.
Here are some great courses or readings to fast-track your learning about impact.
Your university or local EA group likely run EA fellowships, where you can discuss ideas on how to have the most impact
Career Planning
You have ~80,000 hours in your career (that’s 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years), which makes it a fantastic opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. If you spend 1% of that time (that’s 800 hours!) thinking about, testing, and getting feedback on your career to increase your impact by at least 1%, that would be worth it. With that amount of investment, you’re likely to increase your impact by much more than 1%, making career planning an investment with very high returns.
The Short Version (30 - 60 minutes)
80,000 Hours, a non-profit that helps people to use their careers to solve the world’s most pressing problems, has an annual career review tool. This involves guided questions to help you reflect on the last year, consider whether to change your major, and make a plan for this year.
Sudhanshu Kasewa from 80,000 Hours ran a career planning workshop at EAG DC, which you can watch here and below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE2QSM77Mik
The Medium Version (1 - 3 hours)
Apply for a Career Conversation with the High Impact Engineers team. We’ll provide you with some questions and goals to reflect on before having a one-on-one discussion to discuss your career plans. After the call, we can connect you with engineers further along their impact journey and suggest concrete next steps you can take to maximise the impact you can have with your career.
The Long Version (8+ hours)
80,000 Hours has a free 8-week career planning course that allows you to dive deeper into key questions about what you’re aiming for with your career and what problems you want to work on. They can then help you build a more detailed career plan. You might find the worksheet template particularly helpful.
You may also want to book a call with the HI-Eng team to bounce career ideas around or apply for a Career Conversation for a more detailed discussion.
Internships and Summer Projects
Internships are a fantastic opportunity to test out your fit for different roles and industries. Many companies in the US and Europe offer an internship scheme and are often open for applications around October to February time. It is a good idea to dedicate some time to ensure you don’t miss application deadlines.
Summer projects are also great for testing your fit. These can come in the form of fellowships, mini research projects, summer research programs at your university, etc. Coming up with your own summer project is also highly encouraged!
Earning to Give or Direct Work?
Although 80,000 Hours has de-emphasised a career in earning to give (E2G), this is still a viable option for many engineers. An average engineer in the UK could save over 60 lives throughout their career by donating 10% of their post-tax income to high-impact charities. By working for a company like GE that has a donation matching scheme or a payroll giving scheme (allowing you to give money pre-tax), you can further increase the impact of your giving.
However, you could probably have more impact by doing direct work, such as advocacy, policy, high-value research, for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurship, and other work for highly socially valuable organisations. It is worth considering what problems you think are the most pressing, and where you might be best placed to have an impact in that area.
Personal Considerations
(as suggested by 80,000 Hours)
You’re a good fit for a higher-earning option. The highest engineering salaries in the UK can exceed £150,000 — you may earn even more in other industries, or by moving overseas. However, your career must be sustainable for you so that you don’t burn out, and it’s also important for you to be good at your job.
You want to gain skills for use in more direct work later on, and E2G can help you stay engaged with social impact while you do so. Building your career capital allows you to bring greater experience and connections to future roles in direct work. (It’s also possible for you to build career capital whilst doing direct work!)
You’re very uncertain about which problems are the most pressing. E2G allows you to be flexible with where you donate, or even allows you to save the money and give later.
You want to contribute to an area that is more funding-constrained rather than talent-constrained. If you’re especially focused on the problems that 80,000 Hours thinks are the most pressing, these cause areas seem to have more skill gaps than funding gaps, meaning that it’s more valuable to get career capital relevant to the most pressing problems by trying to contribute directly. However, if you think global poverty is the most important cause area, and you think that direct cash transfers are among the very most effective paths for helping the extreme poor, E2G could be an effective way of having an impact in this area.
Academia or Industry?
When planning the next steps after university, many engineers try to decide between doing a PhD or going for a job in industry.
Your answer to this question depends on many factors, some of which are listed below.
Area of Impact
Depending on which cause area you want to focus on, the path to highest impact might lie in academia or in industry.
As a rule of thumb, the more developed a cause area is, you’re likely to have more marginal impact closer to industry.
E.g. civilisation resilience as a cause area is not very developed, so much of the work is in academia.
E.g. alternative proteins are fairly developed, and although there are many start-ups still doing research into the fundamentals of making a great product, many other start-ups are bottlenecked in scaling up.
This is because a less-developed cause area often requires people to lead projects in specific technical dimensions, and a PhD sets you up well to focus on knowledge-centric tasks and communication. If you’re aiming for knowledge-driven, research and development, abstract, or technology-driven roles, then a PhD is valuable.
Which skills are most in-demand?
Other skills that a PhD teaches you include in-depth thinking, strategic thinking, and how to use a data-driven and evidence-based approach (although you can also pick these skills up in certain roles in industry!)
Solutions-oriented work (e.g. writing code, designing systems, completing studies for an engineering firm, etc.) and operational work (e.g. making things) often don’t require a PhD (you can often learn the relevant knowledge on the job).
There’s an argument to be made that historically, research has been incredibly influential and impactful. In that article, 80,000 Hours suggests that if you might be a top 10% researcher in a pressing problem area, research is likely to be the highest impact you could have.
Salary
On average, going into industry will earn you a higher salary than academia.
This is likely to be an important factor if you consider E2G to be a crucial part of your career’s impact.
Personal Fit
Work in academia often involves long deadlines, self-driven work and very little structure. You might be well-suited to this if you like having a flexible schedule, structuring your day, and prioritising your work.
Work in industry often requires a more business-oriented approach. The projects you work on are likely dictated by the business plan and goals of the company. The workday is often more structured around the 9-5 workday, which may be preferable for some people.
Working in industry is often driven by shorter deadlines that tie in with wider business timelines, which means that strong communications and people management skills (even if you’re not a manager) are needed.
Academic work is also likely to include grant applications, teaching courses, publishing papers, mentoring students, and other responsibilities. Pressures come from obtaining grant funding, but academia allows you an equal measure of intellectual freedom.
It’s worth noting that industry has scored higher than academia on job satisfaction.
Networking Opportunities
Doing a PhD allows you to build up a network of people in a specific field that is evolving at a state-of-the-art level. This might allow you to level up faster vs industry.
However, this requires you to choose the right place to do a PhD. The amount of networking depends on the culture from country to country, lab to lab and project to project. If you’re treated more as grunt labour rather than as an employee, you’re unlikely to be able to get as much of an opportunity to network - lots of PhD opportunities in the UK are especially bad in this regard. When selecting a research group for your PhD, it’s a good idea to talk to current and past PhD students to gain a better understanding of what the culture and opportunities are like.
It might be worth considering a 3rd option: for-profit or non-profit entrepreneurship (see below).
Entrepreneurship combines the fast-paced environment of industry with the freedom of academia.
You’re likely to pick up many skills that would be valuable career capital through entrepreneurship, as you wear many hats.
Doing a PhD could give you extra credibility, especially in the English-speaking world, allowing you to get in touch with investors and mentors. However, this alone is probably not sufficient reason to do a PhD.
Further Reading
How to determine if you need a PhD.
Look up jobs in your desired career. What are their educational requirements? What skills do they ask for? Can these skills be learnt on the job or in industry?
Ask someone in the industry. Feel free to get in touch with the relevant people on our directory, or talk to us.
Entrepreneurship: For-Profit or Non-Profit
Entrepreneurship can help you quickly develop an all-round set of ‘founder skills’, including business strategy, creativity, flexibility, organisation, etc. This career capital can be very useful and in demand. Generally, there’s a high chance of failure, so people may be under-incentivised to pursue entrepreneurship to gain personal status.
For-Profit
Setting up new organisations often involves innovation, which is a public good that often cannot be captured by the founders, meaning that people are likely under-incentivised to build new organisations.
Being able to produce innovative products that benefit their consumers and have good side-effects (positive externalities) could have a large direct impact.
Tech entrepreneurship is on average one of the highest-earning career opportunities, although the risk of failure is very high. Here is a test to see if you’d be a good fit for entrepreneurship.
If you do end up going down the for-profit route, Founder’s Pledge provides resources and a community for entrepreneurs to give effectively.
Profit for Good companies such as boas.co may also be a route you’d like to explore. Although you’ll learn a lot this way, starting or joining a for-profit startup may mean that you’re locked in for 5-10 years, so this might not be the most efficient route to founding a project with direct impact.
Non-Profit
Founding a new organisation to tackle a pressing global problem can be extremely high impact. This can look like identifying an intervention, testing it, and then scaling it up if it is successful. Below is a video on the gaps in non-profit entrepreneurship and starting a charity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz42FD00jww
If you’re interested in finding out about the most promising current ideas, you’re welcome to apply for a 1-1 where we can introduce you to people trying out new projects, or give you personalised advice. 80,000 Hours offers a similar service.
80,000 Hours has an excellent list of project ideas that you could work on. If you already have an idea, here are some resources to help you get the project off the ground.
It could be possible for you to take 3-12 months off from your normal work or studies to learn about and test ideas.
Charity Entrepreneurship offers a twice-yearly programme that provides ideas, funding, training, and a network to start highly effective charities. The expected impact of each programme participant is about $200,000 per year in equivalent donations to GiveWell. Here are some resources if you’d like to apply.
Final Thoughts
I hope that these resources have inspired you to start thinking about the impact you could have starting from university. It is important to remember that most people reach their maximum potential for impact around mid or late-career, so you have plenty of time to test your fit and build a career where you could have the most impact.
