Interesting to see the sheer diversity of grants! How open is the Infra fund to funding career transition (e.g. grad school)? I previously applied in a rush but probably need to refine my application and justification a more. I’d be curious to know how open the fund is to this type of activity.
Also, I was curious, I see some individuals are receiving upwards of $50k for a few months of overhead while others are receiving well below $50k for 12 months worth of overhead. Can you explain the reasons behind this? Did these higher-granted individuals specifically develop a development plan justifying the associated costs or was the higher grant for other reasons.
I’d be curious to know how open the fund is to this type of activity.
We are very open to making grants funding career transitions, and I’d strongly encourage people who could use funding to facilitate a career transition to apply.
For undergraduate or graduate stipends/scholarships specifically, we tend to have a somewhat high bar because
(a) compared to some other kinds of career transitions they involve providing funding for a relatively long period of time and often fund activities that are useful mostly for instrumental reasons such as getting a credential (it’s a different matter if someone can do intrinsically valuable work on, say, AI safety or biosecurity as part of their degree); and
(b) there often are other sources of funding available for these that are allocated by criteria that partly correlate with ours – e.g. all else equal we care about someone’s potential for academic excellence, which also helps getting merit-based scholarships.
That being said, we have made grants covering undergraduate or graduate studies in the past.
Also, I was curious, I see some individuals are receiving upwards of $50k for a few months of overhead while others are receiving well below $50k for 12 months worth of overhead.
Could you point to some specific examples? That might help me give a more specific answer.
In general, a couple of relevant points are:
Some grants are funding part-time work, which naturally receives a lower total salary per month.
Grantees have widely varying levels of work experience, and differ in other ways that can be relevant for compensation (e.g. location-dependent cost of living).
That being said, inconsistent grant sizes are a known weakness of our process that we are working on fixing by developing some kind of ‘compensation policy.’
In the meantime, if you’re an EAIF grantee and think you are receiving insufficient compensation for your work, either on an absolute scale or compared to what comparable work earns elsewhere in EA contexts, I strongly encourage you to reach out to us and request an increase in funding. While we may not approve this in all cases, we will never hold such a request against anyone, and in the only case I can recall in which we did receive such a request we very quickly concluded that the original grant was too small and provided a follow-up grant.
Interesting to see the sheer diversity of grants! How open is the Infra fund to funding career transition (e.g. grad school)? I previously applied in a rush but probably need to refine my application and justification a more. I’d be curious to know how open the fund is to this type of activity.
Also, I was curious, I see some individuals are receiving upwards of $50k for a few months of overhead while others are receiving well below $50k for 12 months worth of overhead. Can you explain the reasons behind this? Did these higher-granted individuals specifically develop a development plan justifying the associated costs or was the higher grant for other reasons.
Thanks for your feedback and your questions!
We are very open to making grants funding career transitions, and I’d strongly encourage people who could use funding to facilitate a career transition to apply.
For undergraduate or graduate stipends/scholarships specifically, we tend to have a somewhat high bar because
(a) compared to some other kinds of career transitions they involve providing funding for a relatively long period of time and often fund activities that are useful mostly for instrumental reasons such as getting a credential (it’s a different matter if someone can do intrinsically valuable work on, say, AI safety or biosecurity as part of their degree); and
(b) there often are other sources of funding available for these that are allocated by criteria that partly correlate with ours – e.g. all else equal we care about someone’s potential for academic excellence, which also helps getting merit-based scholarships.
That being said, we have made grants covering undergraduate or graduate studies in the past.
Could you point to some specific examples? That might help me give a more specific answer.
In general, a couple of relevant points are:
Some grants are funding part-time work, which naturally receives a lower total salary per month.
Grantees have widely varying levels of work experience, and differ in other ways that can be relevant for compensation (e.g. location-dependent cost of living).
That being said, inconsistent grant sizes are a known weakness of our process that we are working on fixing by developing some kind of ‘compensation policy.’
In the meantime, if you’re an EAIF grantee and think you are receiving insufficient compensation for your work, either on an absolute scale or compared to what comparable work earns elsewhere in EA contexts, I strongly encourage you to reach out to us and request an increase in funding. While we may not approve this in all cases, we will never hold such a request against anyone, and in the only case I can recall in which we did receive such a request we very quickly concluded that the original grant was too small and provided a follow-up grant.