Thanks for the comment!
So a good strategy might be something like: Identify topics in your field of study (that you find personally interesting, that are currently hot research areas, that your advisor is interested in, etc.), and identify EA topics that you think are important/interesting, then create a 2d grid where you examine intersections of topics in your field/EA topics and see which are fertile.
That’s what we plan to do, with the fact that the grid work will be done by our coaches, who we believe have a comparative advantage in doing this since they have a better overview of EA research landscape and can assess better what students’ opportunities are.
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.