This is great! I’m tentatively interested in groups trying outreach slightly before the start of term. It seems like there’s a discontinuous increase in people’s opportunity cost when they arrive at university—suddenly there are loads more cool clubs and people vying for their attention. Currently, EA groups are mixed in with this crowd of stuff.
One way this could look is running a 1-2 week residential course for offer holders the summer before they start at university (a bit like SPARC or Uncommon Sense).
To see if this is something a few groups should be doing, it might be good for one group to try this and then see how many core members of the group come out of the project, compared to other things like running intro fellowships. You could roughly track how much time each project took to get a rough sense of the time-effectiveness.
This might have some of the benefits you list for outreach at the start of term, but the additional benefit of having less competition. This kind of thing also has some of the benefits of high school outreach talked about here, but avoids some of the downsides—attendees won’t be minors, and we already know their university destination. There might be a couple of extra obstacles, like advertising the course to all the offer-holders, and some kind of framing issue to make sure it didn’t feel weird, but I think these are surmountable.
I’m not sure whether ‘EA’ would necessarily be the best framing here—there are four camps that I know of (SPARC, ESPR, Uncommon Sense, and Building a Better Future) and none of them use a direct EA framing, but all seem to be intended to create really impactful people long-term. (But maybe that means it’s time to try an EA camp!)
Pretty unsure about all of this though—and I’m really keen to hear things I might be missing!
Do you envision these activities before the start of the term as being virtual or in-person? I don’t know how many people would be on-campus two weeks before the start of the semester.
I think I would like to start email blasts slightly before the start of the semester though.
This is great! I’m tentatively interested in groups trying outreach slightly before the start of term. It seems like there’s a discontinuous increase in people’s opportunity cost when they arrive at university—suddenly there are loads more cool clubs and people vying for their attention. Currently, EA groups are mixed in with this crowd of stuff.
One way this could look is running a 1-2 week residential course for offer holders the summer before they start at university (a bit like SPARC or Uncommon Sense).
To see if this is something a few groups should be doing, it might be good for one group to try this and then see how many core members of the group come out of the project, compared to other things like running intro fellowships. You could roughly track how much time each project took to get a rough sense of the time-effectiveness.
This might have some of the benefits you list for outreach at the start of term, but the additional benefit of having less competition. This kind of thing also has some of the benefits of high school outreach talked about here, but avoids some of the downsides—attendees won’t be minors, and we already know their university destination. There might be a couple of extra obstacles, like advertising the course to all the offer-holders, and some kind of framing issue to make sure it didn’t feel weird, but I think these are surmountable.
I’m not sure whether ‘EA’ would necessarily be the best framing here—there are four camps that I know of (SPARC, ESPR, Uncommon Sense, and Building a Better Future) and none of them use a direct EA framing, but all seem to be intended to create really impactful people long-term. (But maybe that means it’s time to try an EA camp!)
Pretty unsure about all of this though—and I’m really keen to hear things I might be missing!
Do you envision these activities before the start of the term as being virtual or in-person? I don’t know how many people would be on-campus two weeks before the start of the semester.
I think I would like to start email blasts slightly before the start of the semester though.