I am starting an Effective Altruism group at UC San Diego. If you are a UCSD student, please join us. If you are not, it may be very impactful for you to share our first event where it best suits you. Event information is here.
If you see this after October 8th, please direct yourself or others to our website or email ([email protected]).
When I was fourteen, I watched a documentary that followed three American college students as they spent the summer in rural Guatemala, attempting to live on a dollar a day, as the locals in this village did. From my air conditioned, high school classroom, much of the documentary shocked me. And yet, I might have forgotten it, or at least not been fundamentally changed by it, were I not flying to Las Vegas with my family that night.
Luckily we did, and it set me off on a path that would eventually lead me to the doorstep of effective altruism. And yet, despite this and despite my strong desire to maximize my own personal impact on global wellbeing, it would take nearly a decade for me to discover a community that thought about impact in the way that I did.
I hope to shorten that time gap for others.
One (potentially) highly impactful way to do that is to start an Effective Altruism group on a college campus. As a current graduate student at UC San Diego, I have both the opportunity and the resources to do that. So I am.
It's not to convince you to start your own EA group, which you definitely can (and there are a lot of resources to help you if you are). I'm writing to ask you all a favor.
My big ask of you is to share our first event, which will take you about 30 seconds to 2 minutes and could change an entire person's career.
1. Direct DMs to individuals you know.
In my experience, the highest return on event outreach is through warm connections. If you know anyone at UC San Diego who might be interested, please let them know about us and our first event! You can reach out to me here or at [email protected] if you'd like to use our 1:1 message template.
2. LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter (or Reddit, or Threads, or TikTok, or Bluesky... or whatever the young adults are on these days).
We have an Instagram (@ea.ucsd) and a LinkedIn. If you have a semi-decent following, or are a professor or student, reposting our kickoff post could lead to at least one sign-up, and that would be highly impactful to our early-stage organization.
3. RSVP!
If you are a UC San Diego student of any kind (undergraduate, master's, PhD, predoc, or postdoc), please join us next week Thursday on October 8th. We'll have good conversation, a quick intro to EA and the group, and free lunch. RSVP here or reach out to us for a 1:1 ([email protected]) if you cannot make it.
