Benjamin Todd

While it would have been easy to simply continue with the path he was on, he decided to leave early and retrain in a different skill.

However, some graduate school programs can boost your career a lot.

If we had to pick, the most attractive grad programs might be economics or machine learning PhDs.

Almost all economics and machine learning PhDs can get jobs involving economics or machine learning if they want, which is not the case with most doctorate degrees.

Machine learning is directly related to one of the world's most pressing problems, risks from artificial intelligence.

While economics prepares you to work on a variety of important problems, including AI policy, global priorities research, international development, and many more.

You can go from economics into the rest of the social sciences or into important positions in policy.

Likewise, machine learning skills can be applied in many other fields of study.

And they both have high-earning backup options.

Besides economics and machine learning, some other useful subjects to highlight given our list of pressing problems include other applied quantitative subjects like computer science, physics and statistics, security studies, international relations, public policy or law school, particularly for entering government and policy careers,

Subfields of biology relevant to pandemic prevention, like synthetic biology, mathematical biology, virology, immunology, pharmacology, or vaccinology.

And studying China, or another emerging global power like India or Russia.

Of course, many people should study options that aren't on this list.

For instance, we've written about how we'd like to see more of our readers study history, and many of the team at 80,000 Hours have a background in philosophy.

However, these subjects are more competitive and have worse backup options, so require a higher degree of personal fit.

And other options can make sense depending on your situation, for example doing an MBA if you're in the corporate sector.

Which subjects are best also depends on your longer-term career goals.

We aim to discuss which kinds of graduate study are most useful to particular longer-term paths within our career reviews and problem profiles.

See Appendices 8 and 9 for summaries.

How can you compare graduate subjects?