Reflection on EAGx Berlin 2024
Disclaimer: I was not the common EAGx-goer. I have more experience, both career-wise and EA-related than most attendees, but more importantly I know very clearly where I want to see myself career-wise.
EAGx Berlin, held September 13-15, was my first EA conference. The Finnish EAs had mostly positive experiences in the past, but without a clear reason to go and somewhat ethically against flying for short trips, I hadn't given them proper thought. However, my career change plans have slowly but steadily been getting more and more concrete, and an EA conference seemed to offer both welcome perspectives/sanity checks and helpful networking. Additionally, 80,000 Hours' career advisor very strongly recommended the conference for me in the summer, so I finally made my decision.
I flew in Friday evening, as I didn't want to take unpaid leave when two days of 1:1 meetings seemed enough. After a surprisingly good sleep – considering I slept next to an overground metro rail – I walked to Urania exactly at nine in the morning. Saturday was a day of mixed feelings, as I had failed to lock in enough 1:1s, so let me elaborate.
I wrote my Swapcard profile two weeks before the event and started looking through the attendees around ten days before the event. While I certainly had a clear profile of people whom I wanted to meet, I was still a bit surprised how few such people there were on the lists. I ended up sending a lot of meeting invitations to people who, while not directly aligned with my primary goals, seemed likely to offer valuable insights or interesting perspectives. These were individuals who, though not my top-priority connections, still appeared to have something useful to contribute to my experience. The invitations didn't start strongly, as I got four declines out of the first seven invitations – two of them being the "biggest fish" I'd liked to meet.
Part of my Saturday problem was also that I spent quite some time waiting for answers to pending invitations, thus unable to send more invitations, leaving me in the end in a situation where I did not have meetings, but also no interesting prospects left to invite as people were quite fully booked by then. I also wonder what the optimal time window is for sending 1:1 invitations to these secondary but still potentially valuable contacts, as some profiles seemed to pop up on Swapcard very late – and some of them could have been more interesting than some that I had already booked.
In the end, I had five 1:1s on Saturday, four of them invited by me. The last was a quite spontaneous call from someone completely different from me, but I tried to help them. In addition to the meetings I had and the numerous declines, I had sent two invitations that were never answered, and one meeting was canceled. Frustratingly, the first meeting was at 9:30 in the morning, the second at 13:30. I checked the venue, read some stuff, talked to a couple of people in the Organization Fair whom I had messaged earlier, and took a walk to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. More of the non-EA comments about my trip are below separately to avoid mixing topics.
Sunday proved to be a stark contrast to my Saturday experience. For the day, I had seven booked 1:1s and two pending invitations still in the morning, one of which got accepted. The day was very different, as I had all eight meetings almost in a row; I think I had only one 30-minute break between them. This was more what I was expecting, and gave some welcome balance to the weekend overall.
While not all of the discussions provided specific, actionable steps, the thirteen meetings overall gave me a very strong sense about which parts of my career plan were sensible and what I needed to add to it. Going through the same story more than ten times helped to hone it in my mind as well, which is in line with my earlier experiences: speaking about a topic out loud to someone helps to rearrange it properly in my own mind as well.
I wasn't expecting professional-level organization, but there were surprises. I have no complaints about the venue, but it seemed quite big for the number of people there. I guess people were very scattered around the premises, but I seldom saw more than maybe a hundred in one space. As the building was big with some large open areas, it occasionally felt like a small boy in his father's shoes. The relative quietness of the event's Slack group amplified this experience. There were several small organizational hiccups: the lunch was very bland and small, the venue opened fifteen minutes late on Saturday, the Org Fair started late, coffee ran out at some (critical afternoon) point, and I received odd Swapcard notifications (such as a reminder of lunch on Monday)... Here and there were small things, but hey, it is a volunteer-organized event.
While my account may sound critical at times, my trip to Berlin was undoubtedly worthwhile. The 1:1s might not have aligned perfectly with my initial expectations, but several proved invaluable on their own. Collectively, they offered a wealth of perspectives on how to navigate my chosen path. Repeatedly posing the same questions to various professionals yielded a depth of insight. Moreover, Berlin served as an ideal test run before the upcoming EAG Bay Area. In this regard, it was a success: I won't need to spend energy deciphering conference dynamics next time.
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The paragraphs below have nothing to do with EA or such thoughts, but is rather a collection of miscellaneous notes about travelling.
I had been to Germany a couple of times before, but not to Berlin. I've travelled comparatively a lot in Europe, though I had a five-year gap from flying recently. While I don't overly enjoy cities, I'm very experienced in navigating them and grasping their layout, so Berlin was as easy to navigate as any other city with a decent grid and public transport. As a historian and history enthusiast, I tend to gravitate towards historical sites in my travels. As my Saturday was far less crowded than it could have been, I decided on the fly to spend the time doing a bit of city sightseeing to add more depth to my trip – compared to sitting idle for hours in Urania or my suicide cubicle of a hotel room.
During the morning break, I walked to see Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which stood impressively and proud while surrounded by modern buildings. Though small inside, it had a solid little history area and some undestroyed stone reliefs. The mosaics were great. I found it very heartening that such a damaged old relic was left standing in the middle of the city.
After the day, I took a bus that crawled alongside the Tiergarten park – which seemed very nice – and went to see the Reichstag. Construction works around it annoyed me, but it is an impressive building with some heavy history. I walked from there to Brandenburg Gate, saw the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, walked past a couple of old administrative buildings, went to the site of Hitler's bunker, ate some ramen and had a whisky, checked out Checkpoint Charlie, and finally took the subway back to the hotel. Taking a train Sunday back to the airport, I completed my collection of different travel methods within the city (taxi, walking, bus, subway, train) and saw a good layout of the rest of the city through the window of the slow-moving train.
Berlin definitely seemed like a city of living culture; the ambience was quite relaxed, and there certainly aren't similar municipal building inspector boards as we have back home. It has a lot of history, but it doesn't flaunt it like many other Central European cities; it seems mostly buried under everything else, pushed aside, if not plainly forgotten. Being half-destroyed in 1945 means the beautiful old buildings are mostly gone, and instead we have soulless structures from the Cold War and modern eras. The best part of the city for me seemed to be the numerous parks with ancient trees – which tells enough about my locational preferences.
