I am organizing at Texas A&M University, which is just a more conservative and bigger version of Purdue. Things like engineering makeup and such are mostly the same, but there’s a lot more emphasis on parochial altruism (helping your neighbor type) and “doing-the-work” culture. For example, Engineers Without Borders has a large chapter at A&M but when I asked about cost-effectiveness they were like “yeah we are spending $30000 to do provide X, (a lot of the costs are due to flights and trips) we care a lot about cutting costs.”
At Texas A&M University for this semester, I did more outreach and got fewer fellowship applications this semester than last semester (38 to 41). I don’t think this is actually bad, because last semester a lot of outreach attempts ended up failing and we had 7 applicants just two days before the deadline (which we extended twice already). Something like 34 people applied in the last 28 hours because of an engineering mailing list.
I am far more optimistic this semester about attrition than last semester. This is because last semester we accepted everyone to see who will attrition away, and it turns out people who applied last minute are very flaky. Also, it was public knowledge a lot of people show up to the kickoff and then attrition out, so it accelerated more people dropping out. This semester, we only accepted 24⁄38.
With this semester, we had like 7 show up for first fellowship meetings (compared to 12 last semester), but they seem to be much more engaged with EA. All of them have done the Week 1 readings and they really want to do stuff like evaluating different charities, and they definitely were surprised that they can save hundreds of lives in their careers by just donating money.
Also, what was interesting is that 6⁄7 fellows who showed up first meeting were girls (gender ratios tend to be opposite in EA groups). But I am going to follow up on everyone who didn’t show up. I feel like many times students don’t show up because they have exams they gotta study for. There’s also an issue of competing with other clubs: I think the key way to fight this is by making the EA group valuable enough for EA-like people.
I am organizing at Texas A&M University, which is just a more conservative and bigger version of Purdue. Things like engineering makeup and such are mostly the same, but there’s a lot more emphasis on parochial altruism (helping your neighbor type) and “doing-the-work” culture. For example, Engineers Without Borders has a large chapter at A&M but when I asked about cost-effectiveness they were like “yeah we are spending $30000 to do provide X, (a lot of the costs are due to flights and trips) we care a lot about cutting costs.”
At Texas A&M University for this semester, I did more outreach and got fewer fellowship applications this semester than last semester (38 to 41). I don’t think this is actually bad, because last semester a lot of outreach attempts ended up failing and we had 7 applicants just two days before the deadline (which we extended twice already). Something like 34 people applied in the last 28 hours because of an engineering mailing list.
I am far more optimistic this semester about attrition than last semester. This is because last semester we accepted everyone to see who will attrition away, and it turns out people who applied last minute are very flaky. Also, it was public knowledge a lot of people show up to the kickoff and then attrition out, so it accelerated more people dropping out. This semester, we only accepted 24⁄38.
With this semester, we had like 7 show up for first fellowship meetings (compared to 12 last semester), but they seem to be much more engaged with EA. All of them have done the Week 1 readings and they really want to do stuff like evaluating different charities, and they definitely were surprised that they can save hundreds of lives in their careers by just donating money.
Also, what was interesting is that 6⁄7 fellows who showed up first meeting were girls (gender ratios tend to be opposite in EA groups). But I am going to follow up on everyone who didn’t show up. I feel like many times students don’t show up because they have exams they gotta study for. There’s also an issue of competing with other clubs: I think the key way to fight this is by making the EA group valuable enough for EA-like people.