This page lists various careers I planned to have throughout my life, as well as I can remember them.
| Age | Career | Reason |
| before 2nd grade | paleontologist | I loved dinosaurs. |
| middle of elementary school | lawyer | To make lots of money for selfish reasons. |
| 5th grade | video-game designer | I loved playing Nintendo. |
| 7th grade | director of photography for films | I enjoyed making home movies and took interest in how to artistically use the camera. |
| 9th grade | some kind of activist or researcher for progressive/environmental causes | Inspiration by Ralph Nader. |
| 12th grade | maybe an environmental lawyer? (I wan't very settled) | I thought lawsuits were a pretty successful way to fight for the environment, inspired by organizations like Natural Resources Defense Council and people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. |
| 1st year of college | a variety of high-earning careers, including investment banking, quantitative finance, actuarial work, and law | I wanted to do earning to give. |
| 3rd year of college | graduate school in machine learning followed by a startup using those skills | I loved academic research on math-heavy topics and thought this could be a fun way to earn to give without as much stress as in finance. |
| 4th year of college (in 2009) | working as a software engineer directly out of college | I was reluctantly persuaded that working right away would earn more money (even over the long run) than going to grad school first. |
| after 4 years at Microsoft (in 2013) | direct research and movement-building related to altruistically important topics; cofounding the Foundational Research Institute | It seemed as though more funding was available for effective-altruism research than had been the case a few years earlier, which meant there was greater potential to get an organization like Foundational Research Institute off the ground. |
| ? | ? | ? |
Even within the category of "research on altruistically important topics", I have not had a single focus area and continue to dabble in new fields.