What should a college student do to maximize future earnings for effective altruism?

If you haven't already, go to 80000 hours.

I am a math major who has had relatively fast career growth. Here is the generalized process that has worked for me and a few of my friends (note that this is primarily based on personal experience and anecdotes):

• The critical skill for creating large amounts of value and quickly growing your earnings is understanding what people value. Most people, especially STEM majors, are really bad at this. They are not able to effectively model the business and the people they work with, so they end up spending a lot of time and effort on elegant solutions that seem useful but aren't what the business values most. So how do you learn what people value? Spend a lot of time improving your communication skills. Write a lot. Talk to people a lot. Gain a general sense of business by reading books like The Personal MBA. Check out sources like Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which is absolutely phenomenal despite the sketchy name. And of course, consistently ask yourself/your boss/your customers if what you're working on is what other people value, or if it's just what seems to be urgent.

• Social skills are certainly important. There are two major branches of social skills, the first lets you work better with others, and the second ensures that a large number of people know that you are competent. Develop both. The classes you mentioned (improv, public speaking, etc.) are definitely helpful. You may also want to read books like The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane, I and several friends have found it extremely useful.

• Most advice regarding majors is targeted towards median outcomes. The strategies for maximizing your mean earnings over a 40-year career are quite different. For example, more specific technical majors (e.g. petroleum engineering vs. CS) tend to have higher median earnings but less opportunity to shift fields, which in turn means lower mean earnings assuming you're already above a certain baseline level of competence. Technical majors are definitely highly valued and well-respected, so do a STEM major, but try to make it something relatively general like CS, Math, or Physics.

• You should definitely come out of college knowing how to write code-even if you don't intend to be a programmer, a strong understanding of what can and cannot be automated is helpful for almost everyone.

• Another next critical skill is learning to negotiate your salary-most people do not negotiate at all, despite the fact that a 15 minute negotiation is often worth thousands of dollars. Again, I recommend Ramit Sethi's book as well as several of the writings on Patrick McKenzie's website.

• Finally, try to work in industries with a lot of change, such as technology. You may end up earning less at the beginning of your career, but it offers much greater opportunities for advancement than relatively sticky industries such as oil. If you're ambitious then over 10 years you'll probably earn more in a rapidly changing industry than a slowly growing one.

Paul Graham:

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.

Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.

Also see Alexei's Maximizing Your Donations via a Job.

Startups! (I do startups.)

The path to success at startups is a long one and you aren't guaranteed to succeed. But you can increase your chances massively. Programming is a critical skill; I think most new big companies have substantial programming components, though a lot of the low-hanging software-only ideas are plucked, at this point. So I wouldn't only study programming.

Social skills are pretty damn important. Social skills I am working on for my job: body language; talking to strangers; pitching; quickly evaluating people; overcoming social anxiety & aversion; public speaking; 1-on-1s; writing in order to be understood.

To address your other bullets: Internships are great, definitely do them. I'd only train "networking" to the extent of "getting people to perceive value when they meet you". I wouldn't spend too much time on "networking events" because there's a horrendous negative selection effect there. Leadership is too vague and you should define what you mean by that. Only do research if you're interested in it, but if you are, you should do a lot of it and focus on it because you could make actual useful progress and that's impressive. (If you're not interested you probably won't make progress so don't waste your time.) Explore career development centers but mostly ignore what they say. Studying abroad is something you should do if it'll be fun and edifying, not for any direct-to-resume purpose.

Petroleum engineering. Would non-oil energy sources cause pay to drop over the next 40 years?

Yes. Also even aside from that there is volatility in fossil fuel prices, and thus demand for fossil fuel occupations. Probably too narrow a specialization for you there, without enough compensating benefits.

Actuarial math. If I understand correctly, actuaries had high pay because they were basically a cartel, artificially limiting the supply of certifications to a certain number each year. And I've heard that people that used to hire actuaries now hire cheaper equivalents, so pay could be less over the next 40 years.

You can do better than that at Stanford, e.g. higher-end fields within finance, or entrepreneurship, or high-end research.

Pre-med.

Medicine has many virtues, but you don't need to sculpt your choice of major around it even if you want this option open: as long as you take and get A grades in the pre-requisite classes, success in any major (with appropriate extracurriculars and test scores) can get you admitted to medical school.

Quantitative finance

Finance can easily beat CS if you don't become an entrepreneur in earnings, but they are closer in risk-neutral returns if one goes the entrepreneurial route. Much would depend on which is a better fit for you.

a science major plus a humanities major has lower earnings than the science major alone; greatest returns are achieved by pairing a math/science major with an engineering major, which increases earnings "up to 30%" above the math/science major alone. I'd guess these effects are largely not causation, but correlation caused by conscientiousness/ambition causing both double majors and higher earnings.

Substantially, but STEM majors are independently desired in particular fields, and act as credible signals to employers.

What other things could increase earnings? Doing an internship every summer.

Yes.

Maybe I could try to get into a leadership position at a student club or something.

Founding things is better, particularly something you actually want to do so that you will put more into it and get more value out of it.

Honors programs, or doing research. Do employers care about this?

Research is most useful for getting a sense of/preparing for/applying to PhD programs and academia.

Studying abroad.

Doubtful. Most study abroad programs push you towards taking less useful courses and being isolated from great things at Stanford (which has a higher density of good connections and resources than the usual study abroad sites).

Be aware that job market advice is somewhat like stock market advice. If it becomes common knowledge that career X is highly compensated (or highly compensated relative to effort/education level), this will cause a large number of young people to enter field X, in turn causing a surplus of workers and depressing salaries. You should try to pursue a career trajectory that is at least a little bit non-obvious.

Marry money?

Stanford sophomore here. I can offer some Stanford-specific advice. In fairness, I've only been here for a year, so you'd probably figure this stuff out pretty soon anyway, but hopefully it'll help.

• 18.8 units per quarter is a lot. I only know a few people who are taking that much. However, I've found that taking 16 or 17 units is pretty feasible (assuming you don't have any other major undertakings such as research or a part-time job).
• This may be obvious to you, but I wish someone had told me this: Go to career fairs. At Stanford, unlike at most universities, you actually have a pretty good chance of getting an internship your first year.
• If you're going to Stanford, you should absolutely take CS106A at the very least. If it goes well, take more CS classes. I'd suggest taking CS106B and CS107 even if you don't end up majoring or minoring in computer science.

Non-Stanford-specific advice:

If you're looking to maximize future earnings via a job, you should probably look at the highest-paying graduate majors, not undergraduate. You can make more money, as Peter Hurford said, in law or finance than in most any job you could get with just a Bachelor's degree.

EDIT: Also, Stanford has a chapter of The High Impact Network. You should join us! I'll PM you the President's email.

EDIT 2: Based on personal experience, I'd recommend against becoming an actuary. My dad was an actuary for 14 years, and he hated it. If you like mathy work, you'll probably find actuarial work terribly dull. Of course, you might have a different experience.

If you have independent software development experience, and curiosity/discipline to acquire more software development skills, you might consider trying to become an "X who programs". This thread has some info. Basically, get official credentials in some fairly lucrative & difficult field that has a need for software developers, and do independent study in software development (and maybe statistics/data science type stuff). More links: 1, 2. This could also be a good way to come up with an idea for a software company in some fairly technical industry (meaning relatively high barriers to entry, and possibly corporate customers that will be willing to pay good money for the product you offer). Going in to traditional software development will be a solid fallback plan, since software company employers care more about your skills than your degree, and computer science knowledge isn't actually all that useful for practical software development.

This data suggests that combining software development with stats/machine learning/big data skills can be relatively lucrative, at least in the current job market. My understanding is that data scientist employers are also fairly lax about official credentials.

If you're interested in maximizing income, I would rule out pre-med. It's sub-optimal preparation for any career except medicine, and medicine is sub-optimal for income. A few reasons:

Salaries are essentially capped by reimbursement rates and man-hours. The best surgeon in the world isn't going to make more than a few million a year doing elective surgeries twelve hours a day year round.

The things that generate the most income for rich people with MD's, patents and start-ups and C-suite gigs, don't require the MD credential. There are better stepladders. The possible exception is medical celebrity, but the odds of you being the next Dr. Oz are extremely low.

The average physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance. It's a fairly straightforward back-of-the-envelope calculation. In addition to losing seven to ten years of income after college (residency only pays a little above living wages) and possibly incurring $250K in student debt when money means the most due to time-value, you'll graduate into a market absolutely determined (for very understandable reasons) to bend the healthcare cost curve down and pay doctors less. American doctors are currently paid much, much better than doctors almost everywhere else in the world, due in large part to guild-like protections, and this cannot continue indefinitely. Globalization's already lined up to crush radiology and elective surgery, two of the better-remunerated fields, and IBM would very much like to put oncologists everywhere out of a job. Another half-dozen specialties are in turf battles against mid-level providers like nurses.

All that said, I highly recommend medicine. Just not for optimized philanthropy.

Good question, and I'm happy to see you are taking it seriously. There are roughly two ways in which you can become an effective altruist: #1 donate a lot, #2 influence other people to donate. These paths are not exclusive, and you probably need to do at least some of #1, so you can lead by example.

So, with #2 you would focus on things like writing, psychology, marketing, sales, etc... However, some might say that the only true way to have influence over other people is to be famous and/or to have power. Thus, you can look at people that have power and/or are famous and see how they got there. Elon Musk is a good example. However, you should also keep in mind what group of people you will influence. Britney Spears is influential, may be even more so than Elon Musk, if you just look at the quantity of people, but clearly their fan demographic is very different. Of course, the type of influence matters too. I bet Britney Spears can easily raise $1M for a stray cats foundation, but she probably won't get anywhere if she tried to convince her fans about importance of x-risk reduction.
When it comes to power, you can get it through political means, other avenues that put you in charge of some highly valuable resource / policy, or you can just go for money. Being a popular startup CEO is an interesting intersection of being both famous (within specific circles), potentially rich, and potentially influential. Best example: Larry Page.

Which brings us to #1. Having more money is simply better. 80k hours has covered how to get the most money out of your career pretty extensively. I'd avoid risky narrow career paths like actuarial math and petroleum engineering. If you miss that narrow high point, you end up in a valley. (Better illustrated by Kaj_Sotala's Paul Graham's quote.) On the other hand being a solid Software Engineer (SWE) will open most SWE doors for you. It's much harder to decide if you should combine that with engineering, math, or if you should double down on CS and have lots of projects and internships to show when you graduate. In my mind, there are three broad CS roads one can take: standard SWE job at a public company (e.g. Google), standard SWE job at a startup (e.g. Ripple or Square), or a job as a quantitive analysts. There are others, of course, but if your goal is $$, then these are probably the best. In terms of EV, I think startups offer the best bet, though it does depend on your risk aversion and yearly discount rate. If it's high then the value you get from a startup is worth a lot less.

I'll mention one more important point to keep in mind. For example, as a doctor, you can help dozens of patients a day, roughly. As a researcher, you can be searching for a cure that'll help a million people. (May be all the people if you join SENS.) As a SWE, you can be working on a narrow AI that can be scaled to work on multiple research projects at the same time. Do you see what side of the fence you want to be on? Simply put, SWEs are taking/automating everyone's jobs, including their own to some extent. Once you fully automate SWEs you basically get Singularity, so you don't have to worry about that outcome when it comes to job security, but with every other job you do. WIth every other job, there is some chance that in the next few decades we'll have an AI doing that job better and cheaper than humans.

I'll also briefly mention another option you haven't considered: no college. I have a friend who just graduated from highschool, and I'm helping him find a SWE job in the bay area. He is definitely smart enough and talented enough to likely get a job at Google or other high quality SWE-heavy company/startup. The upside is that he'll start making money today, and he won't have to pay for college. He'll start learning practical skills, and he won't have to waste time on general education classes. Downside is that he'll have to take responsibility for continuing his education himself: read books, watch lectures, etc... The biggest problem, though, is that he'll miss out on all the social aspects of a university. He won't form the super valuable connections. At the end of the day, people pay extra to attend Stanford and MIT not because the education there is that much better, but because you'll get connected to people that will be world leaders in the next decade.

The highest earning careers generally* are medicine, law, and finance. For medicine, you'll need a specific major (biology and chemistry, usually). For law, you can have any major. For finance, you can have any quantitative major. Thus, I'd recommend you either go medicine or not medicine and pick either biology/chemistry, math/economics, math/computer science, or economics/computer science for your major, depending on skills and interest.

Don't worry as much about overloading your coursework as getting good grades in your classes. High GPA matters a lot for law, and somewhat for medicine and finance. Law and finance don't really care too much about what your majors are or what specific classes you've taken.

Take internships as often as possible. I think it's better to take more prestigious internships than internships relevant to your field, but I could be wrong about that.

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Networking. Stanford's statistics on how 2011-2012 graduates found jobs indicates that around 29% of them got jobs through networking.

This is important, yes. Put some thought into it, but if you're doing things right, in my experience, it should evolve largely naturally. Just make sure to record who you've met and some guesses as to how they could help you. I have a spreadsheet.

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Some way of signalling leadership skills? Maybe I could try to get into a leadership position at a student club or something.

Yes, plus self-direction and management skills, which are more important. Take a leadership position because you're passionate about the club, though, not for overt signaling.

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Honors programs, or doing research. Do employers care about this?

Depends on the employer and the research / program. Generally these can be high prestige, which is good. But a trading firm probably won't care about your english literature research or research on fern mating cycles, etc. Good research projects do demonstrate you can write and think quantitatively, though, which could be an asset.

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*This might be naïve though, because it doesn't factor in cost of living, social environment, cost of school (especially law and medical school), or amount of hours worked. On a per hour basis, I suspect these jobs aren't as high income as they seem.

Play a team sport, especially if you might want to do IB.

Especially since the first two comments here are links, it might be good to have relevant links compiled into a repository if someone were willing to put in the time to make that happen.

(I note that I am being that guy that suggests things that he's not willing to actually do. However, this is likely better than the comment not being posted in the first place.)

I'd guess these effects are largely not causation, but correlation caused by conscientiousness/ambition causing both double majors and higher earnings.

Unless you're certain of this or have some reason to suspect a factor pulling in the other direction, this still seems to suggest higher expectation from doing a double major.

You might like to ask in this facebook group too :)

Your education (whether it's formal by paying a college, informal by life learning) is an investment. Any investment should be evaluated by its expected return which is payoff/risk within a timeline limited by your cash on hand. A startup has a high payoff but high risk in 2- 5 years with low cash on hand. A career is medicine is medium payoff but lower risk in 10-20 years (education plus time to earn) with high cash on hand or ability to get loans. The payoff of owning a franchise business, or three, (like Subway) is high in 5 years with medium risk, but with high cash requirements.

Your maximum earning ability will be limited if you work for someone else, though still potentially high with your list of possible careers (a list that is pretty solid). Running your own business however, increases your maximum earning ability immensely. You mention a lot about what makes you attractive to employers though so you would need to work on your entrepreneur skills (taking risk, understanding financials, dealing with failure) if you go that route.

Other thoughts...

Networking as a factor in future earnings may not be under your control. I expect a lot of people that are accepted into Standford already have strong network connections because of their family. And, of course, because they go to Stanford. Extra work in that department may not help.

Standford's salary survey isn't that cut and dried because it is a snapshot. What are the CS majors earning in 10 years compared to the other majors?

@D_Malik Quantitative finance is bursting at the seams, take a look at the latest trends in MFE programs and Wilmott's CQF. Although it is fun :-)

The engineering programs you listed, coupled with an MBA, will equal bigger bucks than simply engineering on it's own, in my opinion. If you're lucky (rather unlucky, from other people's perspective, hah), you'll be able to join the ranks of the superhuman species of "all pay, no work" Suits.

Also, suppose you do a PhD. In your case, given your interest in altruism, don't simply "do a PhD". Use the opportunity for your own purposes. There have been many theses that have positively affected humanity, see "Tate's Thesis", or Shannon's thesis on Boolean Algebra. I know these examples are old, however, they came to mind simply because of my field. Look up some Systems Biology theses for more recent examples.

Also, think beyond right now. For example, what are the reasons behind wanting to improve leadership skills? Do you want to use your potential leadership skills to influence others to adopt your pov w/ respect to altruism? How are you going to get into such a position (i.e. most people with successful and useful TED talks are not simply good speakers, but they have something concrete happening as well.)

IMO most of these things will be minutely beneficial, however, you'll also likely burn out in the process. Find the most important prerequisites to your success, they'll probably take up most of your time.

Well, going to Stanford with the goal of making a lot of money is a great start! I think the best thing is to go broad as an undergraduate. CS or EE or something is good because you will be able to go in a lot of different directions when you graduate such as finance or the start-up world. Taking some econ/business courses is good and getting prestigious internships in the private sector is good. As long as you work hard and try to do as well as or better than your classmates you should be in great shape to make a lot of money.

Also, I recommend that after reading this comment you close LessWrong and never look at it again. Some clever post might convince you that you'll do more good by doing good directly rather than earning and donating. If you buy into that and end up going to work at MIRI or something you could really harm your earning potential!

IMO, if you really care about us fellow humans do this: Generate utility wholesale, in bulk. Not in bite size chunks. Your actual earnings most likely will not be of any great significance. What you should aim for is to generate great ideas, products, social/political outcomes, rather than a high salary.

CS is a great option for this, provided you use it to deliver better communications, GPS, automation, etc, maybe even AI. If you go on to do crapola iPhone apps and banner ads, not so much.

Scientific research, engineering R&D and the like are also great options, plus these fields are, IMO, exceptionally interesting.

Conversely, GP medicine, dentistry, accounting for example do not scale well in terms of total utility produced, even though salaries can be quite high. Arts and legal occupations have potential, but overall end up barely worthwhile (my opinion!).