EA Internship & Research Opportunities for Undergraduates
TLDR: We’re building a high-impact internship board aimed at helping undergraduate EAs build skills in relevant fields. We’re using internship here as a catchall term to include anything that might occur over the summer (aimed at undergraduates). This can include bootcamps, fellowships, research programs, volunteer roles, or other similar opportunities.
Please submit any relevant internships or opportunities for undergraduates (both at EA and non-EA orgs) here.
[Note: We expect our website to be up in two weeks.]
Overview of Project
Our project consists of two main parts:
1. Building a database of EA internships (and related opportunities) and publishing it as a resource for groups.
2. Providing a funding opportunity (for otherwise unpaid or perhaps non-existent) high-impact internships and research positions (tentative: funding not yet secured)
EA Internship Database
This upcoming database will primarily feature EA-related internships. We will also include other opportunities we would like younger EAs to be aware of, such as bootcamps, funding opportunities, summer schools, volunteer roles, conferences, and awards.
We plan to publish our website, which is currently under development, in late December.
This database will be divided by cause area, including but not limited to: AI Safety, AI Policy/Governance, Biosecurity, Animal Welfare & Alternative Proteins, Global Health & Development, Institutional Decision Making, Meta EA (journalism, EA marketing, EA entrepreneurship, personal assistants, campus specialists, etc).
Opportunity for funding
If an internship on the database is unpaid, individuals can apply through us to get funding for it. Funding has not yet been procured will depend on the applicant’s abilities and the cause area that the internship is in (as different cause areas have different limits for funding)
The criteria for funding will vary by cause area. For example, it is not required for someone interning at an alternative protein startup to be integrated into the EA community, but that may be necessary for an AI policy applicant.
Why this may be valuable:
EAs at undergraduate universities lack a centralized place to find high-impact internships and job/research opportunities that allow them to build skills in relevant fields.
While 80,000 Hours’ job board is great, it’s not optimized for undergraduates and the internships featured aren’t very accessible (e.g. the majority of internships require degrees and/or multiple years of prior work experience). Our board will also feature bootcamps, fellowships, and other summer programming aimed at undergraduates. We’ve spoken with Niel Bowerman at 80k who approves of this project.
It normally falls on university group organizers to share resources and internship opportunities to their group. Many opportunities are shared across Slack channels and informal networks, making it easy for a group organizer to miss seeing an opportunity that could be a great fit for someone in their group.
There are likely substantial time costs from having each EA group organizer individually share and look for resources that could otherwise easily be aggregated.
Anecdotally, university group organizers hear from group members that they wish they had more concrete opportunities to either directly work at an EA org or apply what they’re learned in fellowships to their internships.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Michel Justen, Lenni Justen, Emma Dolan, Adam Krivka, Patricio Ortiz, Sanat Singhal, Danya Adib, and Mason Zhang for their help with this project.
This sounds good; thanks for doing it. A comment:
It seems odd that you’re crowdsourcing submissions and that you don’t share which opportunities you’re already aware of — many people filling out your form could waste time by submitting information on the same role or a role you’re already aware of. In particular, I don’t currently expect that it would be worthwhile for me to share roles through the form, since there’s very likely no counterfactual effect. And you should be
checking/emailing most EA and related organizations, and
checking all of the existing EA internship boards you can find
anyway to get information on whatever summer programs they’ll have, so any submissions on roles you’d have found anyway would be wasted. So I urge you to search exhaustively for roles and share a list of roles you’re aware of before asking for submissions.
(Additionally, you could reduce time wasted by overlapping submissions and increase people’s willingness to contribute by allowing people to just submit a few links rather than so many details.)
Cool. I’m excited about what you’ve found, I’ll submit any roles for undergraduates I know of that aren’t yet on your airtable, and I look forward to sharing your website with my college group when it’s ready!
The fields in the form are all optional (or at least now they are), so you could just submit a link.
One resource you might find helpful is my List of EA-aligned research training programs.
I’d also be very happy for you to either “own” that spreadsheet (i.e. be responsible for keeping it up to date and making any structural changes you think would be useful) or create something that supersedes it. I continue to update it when I stumble upon relevant things, but I don’t make active efforts, and I’m in general happy for other people to take ownership of collections I originally made (since there are many of them spanning many topics).
I messed around making an Airtable of biosecurity-related early-career opportunities earlier this year, more or less for my own reference.
Here’s a link, which might be of interest both from a data design perspective and because you might not have all of the internships listed there (though note that it lists a bunch of non-internship things as well): https://airtable.com/shr1WyRk3o9PdbbIl
One thing that’s a bit unclear to me from the form: is this more of a job board, or more of a list of regularly-occurring internships?
(If job board, some Boreal-summer internships I’d think to link will not be posted yet; if list of orgs / programs that regularly host internships, then the “Application Deadline” would be a time of year rather than a specific date.)
Great that you’re doing this!
The ‘Education status’ part of the form linked seems vague to me. E.g. Does “Who is this opportunity open to?: Undergraduate” mean in undergrad or to hold a bachelors? Moreover, what does “Recent Grad” mean?
+1, distinguishing between “No degree requirement”, “Bachelors”, “Masters” all would be helpful. You could borrow from the 80k board and separate out the “Academic Degree” requirements from the “Relevant Experience” requirements (e.g. “< 1 Year”, “1-2 years”, “2 or more years”)
Hi! This is a super interesting idea and I am incredibly grateful you’re doing it!
I am a science communicator for existential risk and effective altruism and my audience is made up mostly of undergraduates who are interested in EA and X-Risk. I would absolutely love to let my audience know about your internship board once it is live or work and help you all out in any way I can to get information out there on it!
Furthermore, I would be super happy to have the heads of your project on the podcast for a brief chat about the obstacles young people face to getting into the field for upcoming videos on the topic!
In what venue are you doing this science communication? Is it online or in person?
On the form linked it might be nice to ask for some kind of rough expiration date. I.e. how long is this opportunity relevant—a few days, a few months, indefinitely? This way hopefully you can automate the upkeep a bit.
Also would be great to turn this into a newsletter
I had a few potential suggestions, but I was unsure of whether they fit the board’s scope, since they aren’t EA. The thing is, I have often thought (and told some people) that I wish I could have given advice to my younger self regarding: 1) having a portfolio of competitiveness (e.g., deliberately including more lower-tier/less-competitive positions even if they aren’t really what I’d love to do) rather than mainly focusing on applying to positions I’d really like to get (but which happened to also be very competitive, and none of which I got my first year); 2) Building a portfolio of specific types of work skills/experiences that I can tailor to later applications (e.g., data collection/analysis, editing, independent research, daily summaries, administrative work).
All of that is to say: if you aren’t already planning to, I would recommend going beyond simply providing a list of high-impact, high-competition positions that people like younger me probably would have looked at and said “I’ll focus on applying for these positions,” only to end up being systemically under-qualified/competitive. For example, I think that also providing advice about application portfolios and skill/experience portfolios would be quite helpful to people who are in a similar situation as I was.
Did this ever go through? Could be cool if it did to add a link here so I could pass it along to people.