I found myself having the same conversation with several university group organisers during EAGxBoston, sharing the highlights since others may be facing similar challenges. This post (like the conversations I had) raise more hypotheses than answers, and a series of potential experiments the intrepid EA group could conduct. I hope this can spark more idea generation by providing a useful framing and hopefully pulling out the key challenges and what needs to happen to address them.
The issue: Students want to do things during the school year, and do internships (and jobs) that have an impact, are meaningful (often this means EA-branded due to availability bias), but there are limited opportunities.
An example: Aria is a second-year university student who participates in an Intro to EA fellowship at his university and finds it really interesting. Sheâs ready to get involved and wants to do good with her spare time in college. However, she finds that there isnât much to do easily. What can Aria do?
Background assumptions
EA doesnât have many things for students to do and demand for EA âbrandedâ opportunities outstrips supply
You can address this by:
Increasing supply (creating or defining more opportunities)
It seems worth creating more opportunities for activities during school-time
For internships or more intensive opportunities, it seems less clear that this would be optimal given weâll hit natural mentorship constraints at some point (although we donât seem to have hit it yet). We could call this âspoon-feedingââwhich may be appropriate for some people, but is probably not good for most.
Some amount of centralised research will be good because itâs more efficient for the community (e.g. identifying and making socially desirable high absorbency career paths, the best version of this is unclear), but ultimately individuals need to make their own decisions on whatâs best for their unique situations.
Decreasing demandâchanging attitudes on what students want, or doing more targeted outreach to smaller groupsâsee the next point
Community builders want to encourage students to do certain activities but donât have ready-made opportunities for them
Examples include encouraging independent thinking, career planning, career experimentation etc.
However, students have many things competing for their time and these kinds of activities do not always seem most interesting.
We need to frame activities in a way that is meaningful and exciting to students
We want the EA movement to have more people who are self-starters, willing to take risks and exhibit entrepreneurial behaviours. It seems plausible that the highest impact careers in any career path require a lot of experimentation and proactiveness.
People can be inspired to be (a lot) more [proactive], but they need to already be at least a little proactive to start (e.g. itâs possible to go from 20 to 100, but not 0 to 50).
We might need to have some basic filters in place on who we are selecting, but itâs not clear what those filters are and how accurate they are.
Students are impressionableâan EA group has an opportunity to positively (or negatively) impact student members.
We can create a group culture that has a positive effects on participants and makes them more proactive and ambitious.
Experiments
â⌠I think the way to mitigate potential negative effects of too rapid or indiscriminate growth might not be âgrow more slowlyâ or âhave a community of uniformly extremely high capability levelsâ but instead: âstructure the community in such a way that selection/âscreening and self-selection push toward a good allocation of people to different groups, careers, discussions, etc.ââMax Daniel
Here are some things that most university group organisers could experiment with:
Engaging people during the busy school year
Help people carve out time in their schedules to learn more interactivelyâe.g. organisers at Haverford /â Swarthmore tried out an independent study group to do learn by writing. Does your university let students run their own courses or can you talk to professors about flexibility within coursework to do more EA-aligned projects?
Figure out ways to make projects more fun and attractive! MUN seems popularâcan we try to emulate them? Can uni groups coordinate to run inter-university small team programs or competitions which could be more exciting than independently run programs? What other clubs are popular on your campus and how can we emulate them?
Cultivating highly engaged groups /â changing attitudes: Create a high intensity culture of doing things seriously and supporting each other to be more risk-taker, pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones, being kicked in the butt if thatâs what we need. This could help finding useful internships or jobs outside of EA. I propose some suggestions here.
Here are some more ambitious programs we could run pilot MVP programs of:
Coaching. Train up a dozen career/âlife/âprofessional coaches to periodically check in with people. Have small group discussions, 3:1 instead of 1:1 to make it more scalable and create the opportunity for creating culture.
Career events & retreats. Run 20-person career values to action retreats with 4 senior-ish EAs. This may be more beneficial if you can narrow it by career path - e.g. policy in EU or something. Needs to be intensely action oriented, with follow-ups for 6 months. You could run pilots and scale this up yourself, or (if successful) right up a detailed guide & train other organisers so that they can run events locally.
What comes after the intro fellowship?
I found myself having the same conversation with several university group organisers during EAGxBoston, sharing the highlights since others may be facing similar challenges. This post (like the conversations I had) raise more hypotheses than answers, and a series of potential experiments the intrepid EA group could conduct. I hope this can spark more idea generation by providing a useful framing and hopefully pulling out the key challenges and what needs to happen to address them.
The issue: Students want to do things during the school year, and do internships (and jobs) that have an impact, are meaningful (often this means EA-branded due to availability bias), but there are limited opportunities.
An example: Aria is a second-year university student who participates in an Intro to EA fellowship at his university and finds it really interesting. Sheâs ready to get involved and wants to do good with her spare time in college. However, she finds that there isnât much to do easily. What can Aria do?
Background assumptions
EA doesnât have many things for students to do and demand for EA âbrandedâ opportunities outstrips supply
You can address this by:
Increasing supply (creating or defining more opportunities)
It seems worth creating more opportunities for activities during school-time
For internships or more intensive opportunities, it seems less clear that this would be optimal given weâll hit natural mentorship constraints at some point (although we donât seem to have hit it yet). We could call this âspoon-feedingââwhich may be appropriate for some people, but is probably not good for most.
Some amount of centralised research will be good because itâs more efficient for the community (e.g. identifying and making socially desirable high absorbency career paths, the best version of this is unclear), but ultimately individuals need to make their own decisions on whatâs best for their unique situations.
Decreasing demandâchanging attitudes on what students want, or doing more targeted outreach to smaller groupsâsee the next point
Community builders want to encourage students to do certain activities but donât have ready-made opportunities for them
Examples include encouraging independent thinking, career planning, career experimentation etc.
However, students have many things competing for their time and these kinds of activities do not always seem most interesting.
We need to frame activities in a way that is meaningful and exciting to students
We want the EA movement to have more people who are self-starters, willing to take risks and exhibit entrepreneurial behaviours. It seems plausible that the highest impact careers in any career path require a lot of experimentation and proactiveness.
People can be inspired to be (a lot) more [proactive], but they need to already be at least a little proactive to start (e.g. itâs possible to go from 20 to 100, but not 0 to 50).
We might need to have some basic filters in place on who we are selecting, but itâs not clear what those filters are and how accurate they are.
Students are impressionableâan EA group has an opportunity to positively (or negatively) impact student members.
We can create a group culture that has a positive effects on participants and makes them more proactive and ambitious.
Experiments
â⌠I think the way to mitigate potential negative effects of too rapid or indiscriminate growth might not be âgrow more slowlyâ or âhave a community of uniformly extremely high capability levelsâ but instead: âstructure the community in such a way that selection/âscreening and self-selection push toward a good allocation of people to different groups, careers, discussions, etc.ââMax Daniel
Here are some things that most university group organisers could experiment with:
Engaging people during the busy school year
Help people carve out time in their schedules to learn more interactivelyâe.g. organisers at Haverford /â Swarthmore tried out an independent study group to do learn by writing. Does your university let students run their own courses or can you talk to professors about flexibility within coursework to do more EA-aligned projects?
Figure out ways to make projects more fun and attractive! MUN seems popularâcan we try to emulate them? Can uni groups coordinate to run inter-university small team programs or competitions which could be more exciting than independently run programs? What other clubs are popular on your campus and how can we emulate them?
Cultivating highly engaged groups /â changing attitudes: Create a high intensity culture of doing things seriously and supporting each other to be more risk-taker, pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones, being kicked in the butt if thatâs what we need. This could help finding useful internships or jobs outside of EA. I propose some suggestions here.
Here are some more ambitious programs we could run pilot MVP programs of:
Coaching. Train up a dozen career/âlife/âprofessional coaches to periodically check in with people. Have small group discussions, 3:1 instead of 1:1 to make it more scalable and create the opportunity for creating culture.
Career events & retreats. Run 20-person career values to action retreats with 4 senior-ish EAs. This may be more beneficial if you can narrow it by career path - e.g. policy in EU or something. Needs to be intensely action oriented, with follow-ups for 6 months. You could run pilots and scale this up yourself, or (if successful) right up a detailed guide & train other organisers so that they can run events locally.