By Mason Nystrom

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Advice For The Newcomers

There are only two types of advice: the advice someone passes on because it worked for them, or the humbled and ever-present advice learned through regret. Both are valuable, but you should only replicate the former.

My advice stems from both what worked for me and the things I didn’t do. While applicable to many people, my advice is directed towards individuals with little work experience, current university students, or those with a couple years under their belt looking to make a career change. In other words, if your name is Vitalik, you may not need this advice.

Think of this advice like a menu, pick and choose a couple of options that sound appetizing to you and commit to them. Consistency matters.

Become an Intern

If you’re a student at any level and have the chance to become an intern I highly recommend it. This is perhaps the best option for students looking to learn more about this strange world and get some experience. As I stated earlier, interning for a local cryptocurrency exchange in Hong Kong was a great initial experience to get my feet wet and become immersed in the crypto space.

Volunteer

Volunteering can be a great way to get some experience, build your resume, and create connections in the crypto world. I volunteer with Messari by writing cryptoasset profiles. Ryan Selkis’ initial call for analysts was exactly what I was looking for, a place to get started, to jump in and learn as much as possible. I learned directly about ERC20 tokens, layer 2 state channels, and more by writing cryptoasset profiles, as well as indirectly through osmosis. When you’re around exceptional people, their knowledge and experience flows from them to everyone else. The closer you are to those people, the more you learn. Period.

Personally speaking, Messari was a significant benefit to my career early on, not only in experience, but also in terms of stature. In the ‘real’ business world, people listen when your resume has an Ivy League school or reads McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, or [insert your favorite big name company]. It may be unfortunate, but humans have a desire to assign status.

Messari, ConsenSys, Multicoin Capital, Ikigai, Pantera Capital, Binance, and Coinbase are some of the most well-known firms in crypto. More anecdotally, I’ve seen many volunteers from Messari move full time into crypto all because when given a more substantial platform — the Messari community — they used it as leverage to get themselves noticed by the right people.

Long story short, I was able to use the experience and knowledge from my internship and Messari volunteer position to land myself a job at ConsenSys. I also received interviews and job offers from other well-known firms within the crypto ecosystem. Doing so took my career in blockchain from 0 to 1, which is always the toughest step in any development.

Write

Derek Hsue, Myles Snider, Chris Burniske, Phil J Bonello, Tony Sheng, and Kyle Samani all became names in crypto because they started writing blogs about blockchain topics, mostly related to investment or research. One of the highest skills you can leverage is your ability to write. It’s hard not only to write good content, but to have the guts to put your opinions out there. That being said, anyone can be a writer — never tell yourself otherwise. I never thought of myself as a writer either. Now, I’m a writer and marketer at ConsenSys and I author the ConsenSys Market Intel newsletter (like I said, leverage).

Sing up for the Market Intel newsletter.

Some easy pieces or forms of writing:

If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your thoughts, get over it! If you really want to ease into it, start by summarizing great, long, or complex pieces. You’d be surprised by how little time people spend reading. Curated content is important.

Domain expertise pieces: examine concepts in a specific domain. Ethereum and privacy. Blockchain projects in supply chain. Stablecoins. Lending protocols.

Walkthroughs. You did something, now show others how to do it!

You can read the rest of my advice and more about how to find to get a job in crypto on the ConsenSys Blog.

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