Thanks for writing this and I am sorry you faced so many struggles and felt alone.
Arguments around students not having time feel surprising to me. Do you feel like your students are significantly busier than say, MIT students? I would defer to you since you have more context, but I have heard the “students don’t have time” answer from a lot of universities that eventually ran quite successful clubs. So I think it would be interesting to know what ENS students are doing with their time? Do more students work outside schooling or is there a cultural norm around not participating in clubs? Or is the courseload significantly more intense (I think Cal Tech might be the only example I currently know where this might be true)? I think sharing more details on what makes ENS students so busy relative to other schools could help other schools when deciding whether they will face similar problems.
Also, mostly for others who are reading this and thinking about how it applies to their groups, there are some workarounds that schools have tried such as fellowships where people do the reading in the session. Many groups are happy to share their syllabi via the groups slack (though given your cultural concerns many of these may be too English and would have required editing). I think the main thing that makes fellowships the most successful (but far from ideal) innovation in groups is the consistent and recurring meeting nature of it. So would be curious to hear if you think the readings in the session version would work. I like the cozy sessions idea and have seen these be quite successful at other groups too :)
I’m sorry about the communication problems you faced in UGAP and that it didn’t feel like it would be useful. However, 80% confidence that a UGAP mentor wouldn’t have been right for you seems super high! I think it is pretty plausible for the reasons you mentioned that the UGAP programming would be less useful for you but mentorship is very unique to the person and flexible. So my guess is it would have still been valuable even if you mostly didn’t talk about organizing and instead talked about EA ideas and your own career. But maybe we could chat more about what made this prediction so high for you :)
Again, appreciate you sharing and admire your perseverance and innovation here :)
To be completely honest, I can’t describe very precisely what does it mean for ENS students to be “busy”, because I didn’t ask students for their time schedule. I’m not paid by the state, but I do remember having 25 hours of class a week in master’s degree, plus I remember hearing there was 3⁄4 hours of work for each two hours of class. However, there is a big difference between my case and someone who has a contract with the state.
This said, as a general impression, I’m fairly confident that the average student at ENS is busier than in an Ivy league college. A visiting researcher once told this to me.
Also, students are usually freer during a full-time, 35h/week internship, and I also know that ENS is fairly incompatible with having a job on the side. Finally, some students have classes from 7 to 9 pm.
When asked about their organizational skills, a member of the administration told me they were “very well organized”, so it didn’t seem like the bottleneck.
That’s the best I can tell so far, but I’ll try looking into this in more detail.
I forgot to mention it, but we did try reading during the session once or twice (we had already mainly started the projects, then). This is a very good point ! I translated the text myself with the help of a translation software, since EA France is not finished yet with the more carefully done translations. We plan on doing this more systematically this year.
About UGAP, my prediction is mainly the result of Joris himself telling me that it didn’t seem that useful, having heard my troubles. I might have over-deferred here, and I’d be happy to discuss ^^
Hey Camille,
Thanks for writing this and I am sorry you faced so many struggles and felt alone.
Arguments around students not having time feel surprising to me. Do you feel like your students are significantly busier than say, MIT students? I would defer to you since you have more context, but I have heard the “students don’t have time” answer from a lot of universities that eventually ran quite successful clubs. So I think it would be interesting to know what ENS students are doing with their time? Do more students work outside schooling or is there a cultural norm around not participating in clubs? Or is the courseload significantly more intense (I think Cal Tech might be the only example I currently know where this might be true)? I think sharing more details on what makes ENS students so busy relative to other schools could help other schools when deciding whether they will face similar problems.
Also, mostly for others who are reading this and thinking about how it applies to their groups, there are some workarounds that schools have tried such as fellowships where people do the reading in the session. Many groups are happy to share their syllabi via the groups slack (though given your cultural concerns many of these may be too English and would have required editing). I think the main thing that makes fellowships the most successful (but far from ideal) innovation in groups is the consistent and recurring meeting nature of it. So would be curious to hear if you think the readings in the session version would work. I like the cozy sessions idea and have seen these be quite successful at other groups too :)
I’m sorry about the communication problems you faced in UGAP and that it didn’t feel like it would be useful. However, 80% confidence that a UGAP mentor wouldn’t have been right for you seems super high! I think it is pretty plausible for the reasons you mentioned that the UGAP programming would be less useful for you but mentorship is very unique to the person and flexible. So my guess is it would have still been valuable even if you mostly didn’t talk about organizing and instead talked about EA ideas and your own career. But maybe we could chat more about what made this prediction so high for you :)
Again, appreciate you sharing and admire your perseverance and innovation here :)
Hello Jessica, thanks for your comment.
To be completely honest, I can’t describe very precisely what does it mean for ENS students to be “busy”, because I didn’t ask students for their time schedule.
I’m not paid by the state, but I do remember having 25 hours of class a week in master’s degree, plus I remember hearing there was 3⁄4 hours of work for each two hours of class. However, there is a big difference between my case and someone who has a contract with the state.
This said, as a general impression, I’m fairly confident that the average student at ENS is busier than in an Ivy league college. A visiting researcher once told this to me.
Also, students are usually freer during a full-time, 35h/week internship, and I also know that ENS is fairly incompatible with having a job on the side. Finally, some students have classes from 7 to 9 pm.
When asked about their organizational skills, a member of the administration told me they were “very well organized”, so it didn’t seem like the bottleneck.
That’s the best I can tell so far, but I’ll try looking into this in more detail.
I forgot to mention it, but we did try reading during the session once or twice (we had already mainly started the projects, then). This is a very good point ! I translated the text myself with the help of a translation software, since EA France is not finished yet with the more carefully done translations. We plan on doing this more systematically this year.
About UGAP, my prediction is mainly the result of Joris himself telling me that it didn’t seem that useful, having heard my troubles. I might have over-deferred here, and I’d be happy to discuss ^^