Thank you! And thank you so much for your podcasts - like I mentioned in the post I found them really helpful and relatable and am grateful for you sharing so much!
I'm on buproprion xl and generally they don't recommend taking it at night because it can cause insomnia but I'm really lucky and have never really had problems with that. Instead, I just found waking up in the morning extremely difficult - I often woke up sad and just wanted to stay in bed and keep sleeping (even if I had slept a really long time). Due to the extended release, taking it at night means that peak effects are now happening in the mornings when I was most sad / low motivation before. So that was honestly just really great for me.
Thanks! I actually also was using bearable for a while there and had a similar experience of "it's hard to find out info because of confounders but this is generally useful for being mindful of my wellbeing". I don't use it any more but might look into it again :)
I remember thinking it was super cool when I found it
Just wanted to drop in this study: Harvard Undergraduate Survey on Generative AI since it seems somewhat related/interesting :)
Hi Isaac, this is a good question! I can elaborate more in the Q&A tomorrow but here are some thoughts:
Ultimatley a lot depends on your personal fit and comparative advantage. I think people should do the things they excel at. While I do think you can have a more scalable impact on the groups team, the groups team would have very little to no impact without the organizers working on the ground!
I can share some of the reasons that led me to prefer working at CEA over working on the ground:
However, there are some good reasons why you might prefer to work on the ground:
Hey Camille,
Thanks for writing this and I am sorry you faced so many struggles and felt alone.
Arguments around students not having time feel surprising to me. Do you feel like your students are significantly busier than say, MIT students? I would defer to you since you have more context, but I have heard the "students don't have time" answer from a lot of universities that eventually ran quite successful clubs. So I think it would be interesting to know what ENS students are doing with their time? Do more students work outside schooling or is there a cultural norm around not participating in clubs? Or is the courseload significantly more intense (I think Cal Tech might be the only example I currently know where this might be true)? I think sharing more details on what makes ENS students so busy relative to other schools could help other schools when deciding whether they will face similar problems.
Also, mostly for others who are reading this and thinking about how it applies to their groups, there are some workarounds that schools have tried such as fellowships where people do the reading in the session. Many groups are happy to share their syllabi via the groups slack (though given your cultural concerns many of these may be too English and would have required editing). I think the main thing that makes fellowships the most successful (but far from ideal) innovation in groups is the consistent and recurring meeting nature of it. So would be curious to hear if you think the readings in the session version would work. I like the cozy sessions idea and have seen these be quite successful at other groups too :)
I'm sorry about the communication problems you faced in UGAP and that it didn't feel like it would be useful. However, 80% confidence that a UGAP mentor wouldn’t have been right for you seems super high! I think it is pretty plausible for the reasons you mentioned that the UGAP programming would be less useful for you but mentorship is very unique to the person and flexible. So my guess is it would have still been valuable even if you mostly didn’t talk about organizing and instead talked about EA ideas and your own career. But maybe we could chat more about what made this prediction so high for you :)
Again, appreciate you sharing and admire your perseverance and innovation here :)
I have found rocket money to be quite helpful!