• 🧪You’re part of an experiment! 🧪 This is a pilot program we’re expecting that you’ll show up and own this process, and we’ll invest a lot of time to make sure that coaching works for you.
• We are not here to judge. We are here to help you with whatever your challenges. If things in this course are becoming difficult, please let us know. Careers are an “ugh field” minefield. We’re running this program to see we can make things better by providing support and accountability. Our goal is to help you overcome the ugh field - even if it seems like that shouldn’t be our job. If you think that what you find challenging should be easy - tell us! We want to adapt the course to how you work.
• Your preferences and wellbeing is a priority: Our ultimate mission is to help you achieve your goals in a sustainable and healthy way. While we are motivated by impact, we will put your goals, values and boundaries first. That doesn’t mean we won’t push back or challenge you though!
• We’re taking a bet on a high-commitment, high-engagement structure. There have already been programs with smaller time commitments and a less hands-on approach and we are trying something new. We definitely expect to change and refine the program, but don’t expect to change this aspect of it drastically.

📅 Goals and Structure

A 3-4 month career support program to provide you with:

• More clarity on what you want to work on in your career
• More accurate and holistic understanding of the field as a whole (not just EA initiatives)
• Skills to execute your career plan
• Decision-making
• Handling rejection and uncertainty
• Help networking (esp. outside of the EA movement)

Structure:

• Goal Setting Exercise
• You will be assigned a coach after you complete initial onboarding
• Introductory deep-dive call
• Regular calls every 2-4 weeks to start working on your goals, with async check-ins in between.
• At the end of each session, you’ll usually have some concrete action items to make progress on (whether that’s apps, reflection - or even just taking some time to thing about things!)
• (if needed) introduction to 1-2 experts in the space
• In the final month

💃🏿 About us

We don’t think this program doesn’t work without actually getting to know each other.

Vaidehi (EA Forum) is a product manager at a nonprofit tech startup. Reach out to at 📧 (vaidehi@pineappleoperations.org). Dev is a Wellcome Trust PhD Candidate at the University of Edinburgh (dev@pineappleoperations.org). Reach out to him at Elika (EA Forum) is a research fellow at the NIH. Reach out to at 📧 (elika@pineappleoperations.org).

All of us have several years of experience in community building advising and running international conferences, local groups, coaching and career advising. We think there are many barriers to getting into careers in the biosecurity space, and hope this program accelerates the process for early career professionals.

We’re not going to know everything. But what we hope we can provide is some structure, some accountability, and an external perspective to help organize and make discussions more productive.

We're actively seeking feedback - please don’t hesitate to give us your feedback, doubts, worries - we would love to hear it! This is a pilot program and we will probably need to refine and iterate it a lot.

Funding: We received a Long Term Future Fund grant to run this pilot program (and other cohorts) .

🤝Expectations

• 🕜 ~5 hours per month (all in) working on your top career bottlenecks. If you can’t make the time commitment - that’s fine - but coaching may not be the right fit for you.
• 🐄 Meeting times are sacred - you show up on time every time (barring emergencies). We want to create a space where everyone’s time is respected. (If you know you won’t be able to make it ahead of time - let us know so we can work around that, or figure out a way for you to participate).
• 📝 Do your homework. We think most of the value of this program will come from what you do outside of it. If you shuddered reading the word “homework,” let us know (we can use a less ugh-field-y word!)!
• 💬 Communications on email

🦺 Safety

Making progress on your goals and career can sometimes be emotionally challenging work. We want to navigate those boundaries carefully - we think it’s important and valuable to explore emotional blockers, but know that we might touch upon private or sensitive topics. Here are our plan to mitigate these risks:

Regular informal check-ins. We’ll check in with you, both async and during calls to see how you’re doing. If we sense that you might be getting uncomfortable, we might explicitly check-in before proceeding.

During group calls, we ask you:

• Follow Chatham House Rules: Anyone is free to use information from the discussion, but is not allowed to reveal who made any particular comment unless otherwise stated.
• Let the group know if you are sharing something you’d like to stay private

Expectation setting for 1-1 peer coaching calls.

As noted, we see ourselves as peer support coaches. During our sessions, we will help you make progress on your goals by listening, helping you brainstorm ways to tackle your problems and offering accountability. We think that each coaching relationship will look different. We will discuss the following with you during our first 1-1:

• What kind of coaching relationship is helpful for you (e.g. some people like very explicit pushback, while others may prefer a more exploratory approach)
• Your boundaries (e.g. are there topics you explicitly don’t want to discuss?)
• Private by default - we won’t share anything you tell us with people outside of the Pineapple team. Note that we aren’t required to keep things private. If we are concerned about your safety, we may talk to CEA’s Community Health team to take their guidance.
• We sometimes get asked to refer people for opportunities. We’ll talk through ways to handle scenarios like that and possible options.

Raising issues: Please feel free to raise any issues (no matter how small) with us so we can be better calibrated. We want to err on the side of getting more information, rather than less. If you have a negative experience during the program, feel free to reach out to:

• Dev, Vaidehi or Elika
• Dion Tan (she is a Pineapple Ops team member who is not facilitating this cohort)
• Anonymously (note that with the small cohort it may be hard to be truly anonymous, so please remove identifying details)