TL;DR:
This spring, we at PISE (Positive Impact Society Erasmus) introduced the EA Introductory Fellowship as a one-credit elective at Erasmus University Rotterdam, a well-ranked Dutch university with a strong economics department. The ultimate goal in our theory of change is to get as many students as possible to do the most good they can, primarily through impactful careers and earning-to-give. The fellowship is how most of the students at our school become familiar with effective altruism and eventually become active in the community (and if you’re organizing a student group and not running a fellowship, you should seriously consider it. It’s a great way to communicate ideas in a high-fidelity manner that sticks).
The same is true for most other student groups, so if you’re already running a fellowship, it’s worth checking if you can get your fellowship accredited since most of the work is already done. An accredited course is a great way to significantly extend reach and improve the reputation of student groups. For us, the effort to get our fellowship accredited was surprisingly low (~4 meetings with the university, including the necessary preparation). We want to share how and why we did it in order to inspire and encourage other groups to find ways to do the same.
The main advantages we found were:
Here we talk about what we learned about the process of getting the fellowship accredited and how we made it happen, including advice for anyone looking to do the same.
Our Economics bachelor’s degree has a “Career Skills” program, a mandatory one-credit requirement that lets final-year Economics students choose from a number of pass/fail electives on a wide range of topics. We actually knew about this for a long time, but only thought to sign up much later. As far as we know, there is no official procedure for adding new courses, and we got in touch with someone at a different association who put us in contact with the program coordinator. So don’t be afraid to do some digging and just send an email stating your interest if you see a good fit for your fellowship somewhere.
We encourage you to look around for opportunities where the fellowship would be a good fit at your university. Some examples:
You can also just email the university and ask if they would be willing to accredit the fellowship as is (that is, validate the workload and acknowledge students’ effort) even if these credits do not count toward their degree.
It is likely that a person (gatekeeper), or group of people, will be responsible for passing your request along before it’s officially considered by the university. That was our case. It is imperative that you make a good impression right away, which means preparing all relevant documents for your application before you begin presenting the course to anyone. These will depend on your situation, but you should be proactive and show that you’ve thought about the learning value of the course.
Here are the documents we prepared in advance for our initial pitch of the course:
Alignment of the course with our faculty’s learning goals (we had no idea what these were before this; we just got them off the internet). If you can find the learning goals of your specific degree program, even better.
The course workbook (including all the readings and exercises). Making it look pretty is easy and can significantly improve first impressions.
Breakdown of the workload. This was useful for us because the course had very specific workload requirements, but things might be different for you.
Other things that can help you make a good impression:
This is where things get fun! If you’ve run an introductory fellowship before, this shouldn’t be much different, with a few important exceptions. Here are the changes we made:
We introduced assignments. Weekly assignments ensured students actually completed the readings, which is essential for keeping discussion quality high, since everyone arrived with the same baseline knowledge. Students submitted notes on exercises tied to the reading, which we used both to shape the tutorial discussion and to get a direct read on each student’s thinking. We graded everyone’s submission on a 0 to 2 scale based on effort and engagement with ideas, which we think was a great motivator. This also allowed us to leave feedback and notes on some submissions, which was not previously possible. This took a long time, and we think it primarily resonated with the most interested students. We used these notes to challenge students’ reasoning, go deeper on specific ideas, and point students with particular interests toward relevant EA opportunities. It also gave us a clear sense of which topics appealed to them most.
Other options we considered were weekly quizzes and posting discussion points on a shared message board. We stuck with weekly submissions of their notes on the readings and exercises because it was the best way to make everyone engage with the material in a thoughtful manner and think critically.
We introduced a free book as a prize for the best scores. This was possible thanks to submissions and grading. At least one winner directly mentioned that the grade and book combo was a big motivator in their effort. By inviting the winners to the office, we were also able to talk to them about their career plans for 30+ minutes. Thus, we highly recommend handing out a book to the most enthusiastic students.
For the final assessment, students completed an adapted version of the 80,000 Hours career planning template, tailored to incorporate EA opportunities into their own career plans. We especially pointed them toward the EA Fellowship List.
We tailored the curriculum to our audience. If you’re organizing the course for a specific faculty, you can adjust the curriculum to make it more engaging depending on their expertise. For our Economics cohort, we added one cost-effectiveness estimation and one Bayesian probabilities exercise.
The structure was almost unchanged. We ran two tutorial groups at different times in the week, which widened the pool of students who could attend. In hindsight, a single tutorial group would have made coordination and arranging guest speakers considerably easier. Our first session featured Henry Abbink, a Tobacco Free Future Fellow at the School for Moral Ambition, who used the tobacco industry as a compelling example of a neglected, tractable, and large-scale problem outside the usual EA cause areas.
In total, we had five discussion groups of six students across the two tutorial groups, each with one facilitator. Sessions opened with a short topic intro, followed by an interactive game (like the line game, where people position themselves along a line based on agreement with a statement, or the Fermi estimation game), then roughly an hour of discussion on the readings.
There were some caveats for us as well, though not all of them might be generally applicable.
There was weaker selection on motivation and interests. There were only a handful out of 27 students who seemed intrinsically motivated by impact, showing interest beyond the assigned readings, and whom we expect to take further action after the fellowship. This is a lower rate than usual.
Still, we taught the scale, neglectedness, and tractability framework for evaluating global problems, which we think is valuable, since students can use it to increase their impact outside of EA cause areas. Since our course only had final-year Economics students, who were generally ambitious but were also more fixed in their career choices, we also put a greater focus on earning-to-give than usual. We would recommend being flexible and focusing on topics that are most likely to result in action in your particular student group.
It is plausible that people in an accredited course tend to be less intrinsically motivated than participants in a regular course. We would thus recommend to prioritize the regular course if you think that it is likely that the motivation in this group is higher.
Yet, if you’d be running the course on top of the regular fellowship (as was our case), then you'll already reach more people than you normally would. Having the accredited course allowed us to run the fellowship an additional time and reach people who would never have joined in the first place (that is, the counterfactual of running the accredited course was not running anything at all, or perhaps a different activity such as a committee). In this case, you would have to weigh this against the cost of your time and effort, which for us was worth it, even if the cohort was perhaps weaker. The specifics of this will vary based on the situation and student body at your university.
Our course name was “PISE – Pursuing a Positive Impact Career”, which may also have contributed to the weaker motivation we saw. Students told us that the name led them to expect a course on making their career in a certain fixed field more impactful, rather than choosing an impactful one. We are still looking for a better-fitting name and are open to suggestions.
There might be alternative ways to work EA into university teaching (including involving professors). We do think that weaving EA concepts into established, professor-led courses might be even more effective, since a broader audience is reached for less effort from the group, though this depends heavily on how the professor frames EA. Having an accredited course could be a first step in that direction. If you know of an EA-sympathetic professor at your university, we’d really recommend reaching out to them to discuss the possibility of setting up a course or elective. There are a lot of examples of EA courses, but most of them don’t seem to outlast their founders. Starting with courses that are evergreen and perhaps lower effort seems like a good start.
It goes without saying, but if you’re a professor at a university, establishing a course on effective altruism is a great way to share altruistic ideas with a large number of people at the same time (speaking as students ourselves, we would have killed to have such a course in our degree!).
We are unsure how the impact of an accredited course compares to the regular fellowship. In our situation, it’s likely that the accredited course is somewhat less impactful than usual. It’s plausible that offering credits means the students who join are less intrinsically motivated. We noticed that in the regular fellowship there was usually more consensus as people with opposing views self-selected out early. For us, the accredited course will be an addition to the regular fellowship, not a replacement for it.
If your group has been running the introductory fellowship for some time already, you should check if there are opportunities to get it accredited. We also had no clear avenue for it at first, so don’t be afraid to send some cold emails. It’s very low-cost, high-reward in terms of reputation, reach, and skill-building. So if you're considering it, try giving it a shot and reach out to us if you have any questions!
You can email Andrei ([email protected]) or Lili ([email protected]) directly with questions, advice or to ask us to share resources and marketing materials. Feel free to use any of the materials below.
