Thanks for writing up the project! I liked the idea of Effective Thesis when I first heard about it, but I wasn’t sure how well a small team would be able to advise a large number of students with varying backgrounds and majors. It sounds as though the results have exceeded my expectations. (Also, the “Agendas” page of the website has been a really handy resource for me.)
1⁄3 of students appreciated general advice on research direction, 1⁄3 appreciated academic career-related advice and 1⁄3 appreciated guidance in the topic they came up with themselves.
This is an interesting statistic. I’d have thought that nearly all the students would mostly benefit from “general advice on research direction”, since specialized EA knowledge is something Effective Thesis has that professors and career offices don’t.
1. Can you give an example of what “guidance in the topic they came up with themselves” might look like? Particularly in a case where the coach isn’t an expert on the topic?
2. Do you have any general observations of where your applications came from? I’d be interested in both the country/regional breakdown and a breakdown of applicant school rankings (e.g. “1/3 from schools in or around the top 100 of this list, most of the rest from other private American/European schools, a few from other continents”).
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Finally, thanks for linking to your interview questions; it helps put the answers you got in context, and I like being able to see the back-end infrastructure of EA projects.
I’d have thought that nearly all the students would mostly benefit from “general advice on research direction”, since specialized EA knowledge is something Effective Thesis has that professors and career offices don’t.
That would be my guess as well. Maybe the average advice they would get would not be that good or they would get as good advice anyway from professors and career offices but they got it first from the Effective Thesis and therefore attributed the value to Effective Thesis. However, when trying to estimate the overall counterfactual impact, I have usually rated cases which referred “career advice” or “help with topic they came up with themselves” as the main sources of value they got from Effective Thesis as being less impacted by Effective Thesis than cases which appreciated and used “general advice on research direction”.
1. Can you give an example of what “guidance in the topic they came up with themselves” might look like? Particularly in a case where the coach isn’t an expert on the topic?
Usually I’ve tried to match student with a coach who would be expert on the broader domain of the topic student came up with. Example could be a philosophy student who came up with 3 different topic ideas related to global priorities research. The coaching helped him prioritise between these 3 topics and choose the one which would be best in student’s situation. Another student came up with a broader topic and coaching helped him take a perspective of the topic, use a specific methodology and/or focus on a specific issue within the topic.
2. Do you have any general observations of where your applications came from? I’d be interested in both the country/regional breakdown and a breakdown of applicant school rankings (e.g. “1/3 from schools in or around the top 100 of this list, most of the rest from other private American/European schools, a few from other continents”).
I’ve asked people “Where did you learn about the Effective Thesis from” in the application form but the results show no specific trend and there are too few cases to draw conclusions from. 5 most frequent channels were word of mouth (14 people), university referral (12), non EA online blog post—Thesis Whisperer (11), facebook referral (11), personal connections/individual outreach (10) and all produced candidates of similar qualities in terms of chance of getting through the funnel, desire to continue in research career and involvement in EA.
I haven’t done breakdown by country and school rankings systematically yet, but I will take a closer look and update the post soon. My impression was that people are applying from many countries around the world, even those where there is not visibly large or active EA group and I haven’t noticed any strong trend (e.g. that half of the people would be from the UK or something like that). Regarding school rankings, prevalence of candidates from top rated schools is much higher than chance which is in my opinion the result of sampling people from the EA community, however, I need to crunch the numbers to get a more specific information.
Thanks for writing up the project! I liked the idea of Effective Thesis when I first heard about it, but I wasn’t sure how well a small team would be able to advise a large number of students with varying backgrounds and majors. It sounds as though the results have exceeded my expectations. (Also, the “Agendas” page of the website has been a really handy resource for me.)
This is an interesting statistic. I’d have thought that nearly all the students would mostly benefit from “general advice on research direction”, since specialized EA knowledge is something Effective Thesis has that professors and career offices don’t.
1. Can you give an example of what “guidance in the topic they came up with themselves” might look like? Particularly in a case where the coach isn’t an expert on the topic?
2. Do you have any general observations of where your applications came from? I’d be interested in both the country/regional breakdown and a breakdown of applicant school rankings (e.g. “1/3 from schools in or around the top 100 of this list, most of the rest from other private American/European schools, a few from other continents”).
--
Finally, thanks for linking to your interview questions; it helps put the answers you got in context, and I like being able to see the back-end infrastructure of EA projects.
That would be my guess as well. Maybe the average advice they would get would not be that good or they would get as good advice anyway from professors and career offices but they got it first from the Effective Thesis and therefore attributed the value to Effective Thesis. However, when trying to estimate the overall counterfactual impact, I have usually rated cases which referred “career advice” or “help with topic they came up with themselves” as the main sources of value they got from Effective Thesis as being less impacted by Effective Thesis than cases which appreciated and used “general advice on research direction”.
Usually I’ve tried to match student with a coach who would be expert on the broader domain of the topic student came up with. Example could be a philosophy student who came up with 3 different topic ideas related to global priorities research. The coaching helped him prioritise between these 3 topics and choose the one which would be best in student’s situation. Another student came up with a broader topic and coaching helped him take a perspective of the topic, use a specific methodology and/or focus on a specific issue within the topic.
I’ve asked people “Where did you learn about the Effective Thesis from” in the application form but the results show no specific trend and there are too few cases to draw conclusions from. 5 most frequent channels were word of mouth (14 people), university referral (12), non EA online blog post—Thesis Whisperer (11), facebook referral (11), personal connections/individual outreach (10) and all produced candidates of similar qualities in terms of chance of getting through the funnel, desire to continue in research career and involvement in EA.
I haven’t done breakdown by country and school rankings systematically yet, but I will take a closer look and update the post soon. My impression was that people are applying from many countries around the world, even those where there is not visibly large or active EA group and I haven’t noticed any strong trend (e.g. that half of the people would be from the UK or something like that). Regarding school rankings, prevalence of candidates from top rated schools is much higher than chance which is in my opinion the result of sampling people from the EA community, however, I need to crunch the numbers to get a more specific information.
Thanks for the comment!
The update is on, in the section Promotion of the project.