I lead CEAâs University Groups team. We often post updates on the Forum about what weâre up to, and are always happy to answer questions!
I helped start & ran Positive Impact Society Erasmus (PISE) in 2020-2022, and was co-lead for EAGxRotterdam 2022. Iâm happy to answer any questions about those experiences!
Intro fellowship sign-ups at EA groups participating in Early OSP doubled this Fall.
CEAâs University Groups Team is increasingly focusing its marginal efforts on piloting more involved support to a subset of EA university groups. This pilot program â Early OSP or EOSP[1] â includes early mentorship (starting in the summer), a semester planning retreat in August, and a workshop around EAG Boston, among other initiatives.
With the Fall semester now complete, we are analyzing initial outcomes. One standout result is that intro fellowship applications at EOSP groups averaged 32 per group, up from 14 the prior year[2]. Although we lack full baseline data, there are promising indicators â two groups, for instance, went from zero applications in Fall 2023 to meaningful engagement this year.
Of course, this is just one metric among the many that matter[3]. It is, however, an encouraging signal, that weâre hoping to build on as we continue to build out principles-first EA.
Early OSP (EOSP) is modeled after our regular Organizer Support Program. EOSP kicked off with organizers from these groups: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, UC Berkeley, UChicago, UPenn, Oxford, and Cambridge. They have been anonymized on the graph.
Thank you to everyone who made this happen, especially the group organizers at all these universities!
Weâre still collecting data on other metrics, and hope to share a more all-things-considered take in the future.
Nice stuff!
Does this in any way relate to the course (and fast track) BlueDot announced recently?
Iâd also be keen to hear more about this!
Thank you for writing this! I wish I had internalized some of these points more while I was at university, and guess others will feel the same.
One thing in particular that I recognized is viewing 80,000 Hours (and the EA community more broadly) as offering definitive answers, rather than tools and questions. Looking back, I realize I maybe fell into that mindset. I almost expected that if I just followed the ârightâ path they laid out and worked as hard as I could, Iâd maximize my impact. That was, of course, a very soothing thought, drastically simplifying the complexity of my career choice. But it was also very wrong, and Iâm grateful that this quick take is now there to point this out :)
Just wanted to bump this comment, Iâm interested
I came across this post because of Wrapped this year. This was such a nice story, thank you @atb !
Sent you a DM! Sorry about the delay here, I didnât see the notificationsâI might post from my personal Forum account next time to prevent situations like these :)
Hey Saul, Iâm not sure how but I missed this comment! Sorry about that!
I think that the best way to answer your question is by reading this & Open Philâs original post so that where it says âAI safety groupsâ you read ânon-EA groupsâ. That is my understanding from Open Philâs original post.
Does that help?
I havenât managed to fully sync with EAIF or other orgs yet, but in the meantime just wanted to encourage people in this position to apply to OP before the 31st!
Hey Gergo, just wanted to say Iâve seen this and hope to get back to you soon!
Hi Weronika, thank you for sharing your story and reflections so openly! I basically think you are right in there probably being organizers for whom the stipends are the difference between organizing their EA group and not doing so, and I really want to make sure we take this point into account as my team dives into considerations around part-time stipends in the new year. As @satpathyakash notes, I think an imporant question here is the scale, and I hope to make some progress on this point!
I also wanted to flag explicitly that we are tracking the diversity concern you note.
I expect that as part of our research in the new year, weâll set up various ways of asking stakeholders, including current, former, and potential organizers, for input. I would be keen to include you in this process, if youâre happy to keep sharing your thoughts! And as always: thanks for organizing your group :)
Hi @peterhartree, Iâm getting an error when trying to open the voting form:
âYou need permissionâThis form can only be viewed by users in the ownerâs organization.â
Note: we have tried to write out what these changes mean for EA university group organizers here!
Hey Jason, just wanted to follow up to let you know this is still on our radar. I havenât prioritized it but still plan on getting back to you here. Sorry about the delay!
Thanks for the question Jason! Iâll try to see if we can share more info here
As a quick reply, I think (in rough order) our largest budget items are staff costs and group support funding. Next would be costs associated with retreats, our internship and then reimbursements for mentors in OSP.
Hey, Iâm Joris and I currently run CEAâs University Groups Team. I just wanted to share some more personal thoughts on this topic. My thoughts do not represent CEAâs official position and are also a bit messy, but I wanted to share them to be transparent and maybe provide some insight into how I am thinking about things.
First, I just wanted to flag that the team and I are aware of the many discussions on the topic of âtopâ or âfocusâ universities that have happened on the Forum. Many of our internal conversations touch upon many of the arguments raised there
I think itâs important to keep in mind that most talented people that weâd want to contribute to the EA mission are just not at these few institutions
Zooming out, I believe that most talented, altruistic and driven people in the world might just never even get a chance to act on those motivations due to large systemic issues like poverty, lack of education, or just a sheer dearth of opportunities to do good on a large scale more generally.
I think a lot of EA initiatives try to address these problems, but I donât think itâs where our team should try to make a dent in the world (at least not directly).
On a more actionable note, however, it does feel like there is a subsection of the worldâs population that we can reach with EA ideas, and we should make sure to prioritize well between all of those possible audiences. I think itâs now the right call to spend some of our marginal efforts on improving EA groups at these âtopâ universities:
Now that our scalable support feels firmly in place and reaches hundreds of organizers around the world, I feel better about focusing more of our efforts on the pilot universities. This, together with our focus on âwhat things from our pilot program can we scale to other groups?â, makes things feel different from past work with âtopâ universities
For context: the University Groups Team currently consists of Alex, Jemima, Joris, ~0.5 of Sam (heâs still studying), and our assistants Anto and Igna. Iâd estimate that from May till now, about 20% of our combined time has been spent on mentorship and other support for the pilot uni program, while at least 30% of our time is spent on broad support programming
Personally, Iâm excited to be focusing more of my time on our scalable support once we have onboarded someone for the pilot university role!
In general, I often notice myself thinking that I feel sad to live in a world where a small fraction of the population has such outsized opportunities to shape the world. But people in certain positions do have outsized resources to impact the world, and if we get a chance to inspire these
people with EA ideas and motivate them to act on them, we should. Iâm excited to find someone who can work with us on making the most of this large opportunity for impact, and hope people apply for the role!
You can maybe pull from this AMA Peter Singer did on the Forum; thereâs some unanswered questions there