I've recently completed the in-person ARENA program, which is a 5-week bootcamp teaching the basics of safety research engineering (with the 5th week being a capstone project). Sometimes, I talk to people who want to work through the program independently and who ask for advice. Even though I didn't attempt this, I think doing the program in-person gives me some insight into how to get most out of the program when doing it independently, so here are my thoughts and tips:

On working speed

Day 0.0 (prerequisites) takes the typical person more than one day to work through.
Most other days are feasible to mostly finish within a day in the in-person program. In-person, participants spend around 6-7 hours per day on pair-programming. There are a few factors that will likely make you slower when you're on your own:
- If you don't find a working partner, then working deeply for 6-7 hours per day might be infeasible depending on your dispositions. In-person it gets feasible since you alternate with your pair-programming partner, which reduces the overall load on your attention.
- Often when you struggle in-person, your working partner knows how to move on. If both partners don't know what to do, you can ask a teaching assistant (TA). So you should expect to struggle more often, and for longer, if you're alone.
Some days are substantially longer than what you could complete within one day even when doing the program in-person. Most of these days are in week 1 on transformer interpretability. Someone told me that one could probably spend a whole week on the day on SAEs alone.
Week 1 on transformer interpretability contains 9 days of content (which are longer on average than typical days in other weeks), so even in the in-person program, participants only attempt a subset of these. All other weeks actually roughly fit within a week.

How should you approach each day?

Often there is reading material at the start of a day, e.g. in the form of well-known papers. In my experience, the ARENA material is often self-contained enough that I wouldn't recommend spending much time on actually reading these papers, unless it later turns out that you don't understand something.^[1]
Each day is largely structured into exercises that isolate a small concept. All exercises have provided solutions. When should you look at solutions?
- For things that are very important to learn (e.g., how to impleme

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Angela Tang

Angela Tang

Angela Tang

Angela Tang