Thanks for writing a summary of your progress and learnings so far, it’s so useful for the EA community to share its findings.
A few comments:
You might consider making the website more targeted. It seems best suited to undergraduate theses, so it would be useful to focus in on that. For example, it might be valuable to increase the focus on learning. During your degree, building career capital is likely to be the most impactful thing you can do. Although things like building connections can be valuable for career capital, learning useful skills and researching deeply into a topic are the expected goals a thesis and so what most university courses give you the best opportunity to do. Choosing a topic which gives you the best opportunity for learning could mean, for example, thinking about which people in your department you can learn the most from (whether because the best researchers, or because they are likely to be the most conscientious supervisors), and what topic is of interest to them so that they’ll be enthusiastic to work with you on it.
People in academia tend to be sticklers wrt writing style, so it could be worth getting someone to copy edit your main pages for typos.
Coming up with a topic to research is often a very personal process that happens when reading around an area. So it could be useful to have a page linking to recommended EA research / reading lists, to give people an idea of where they could start if they want to read around in areas where ideas are likely to be particularly useful. For example you might link to this list of syllabi and reading lists Pablo compiled.
Choosing a topic which gives you the best opportunity for learning could mean, for example, thinking about which people in your department you can learn the most from (whether because the best researchers, or because they are likely to be the most conscientious supervisors), and what topic is of interest to them so that they’ll be enthusiastic to work with you on it.
I agree. This is one of the inefficiencies of the “list of predefined topics” concept we would like to improve by shifting to Thesis Topic Coaching. The plan is to count in the individual supervisor availability when offering topics. However, I guess that most students’ supervisors won’t be mainly focused on some EA topic so we will have to find a balance between advising to choose a topic which the supervisor is mainly focused on and a degree to which the topic relates to EA causes for each student individually.
Coming up with a topic to research is often a very personal process that happens when reading around an area
You mean reading generally about EA? The value we wanted to add by this project is not to compile general reading lists in which students would have to search themselves, but helping them in the process of choosing a topic individually by directing them toward specific EA sub-topics relevant to their degree, experience and circumstances.
Thanks for writing a summary of your progress and learnings so far, it’s so useful for the EA community to share its findings.
A few comments:
You might consider making the website more targeted. It seems best suited to undergraduate theses, so it would be useful to focus in on that. For example, it might be valuable to increase the focus on learning. During your degree, building career capital is likely to be the most impactful thing you can do. Although things like building connections can be valuable for career capital, learning useful skills and researching deeply into a topic are the expected goals a thesis and so what most university courses give you the best opportunity to do. Choosing a topic which gives you the best opportunity for learning could mean, for example, thinking about which people in your department you can learn the most from (whether because the best researchers, or because they are likely to be the most conscientious supervisors), and what topic is of interest to them so that they’ll be enthusiastic to work with you on it.
People in academia tend to be sticklers wrt writing style, so it could be worth getting someone to copy edit your main pages for typos.
Coming up with a topic to research is often a very personal process that happens when reading around an area. So it could be useful to have a page linking to recommended EA research / reading lists, to give people an idea of where they could start if they want to read around in areas where ideas are likely to be particularly useful. For example you might link to this list of syllabi and reading lists Pablo compiled.
Thanks for your comment!
I agree. This is one of the inefficiencies of the “list of predefined topics” concept we would like to improve by shifting to Thesis Topic Coaching. The plan is to count in the individual supervisor availability when offering topics. However, I guess that most students’ supervisors won’t be mainly focused on some EA topic so we will have to find a balance between advising to choose a topic which the supervisor is mainly focused on and a degree to which the topic relates to EA causes for each student individually.
You mean reading generally about EA? The value we wanted to add by this project is not to compile general reading lists in which students would have to search themselves, but helping them in the process of choosing a topic individually by directing them toward specific EA sub-topics relevant to their degree, experience and circumstances.