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Summary

  • I’ve published EA Opportunities, an improved rebrand of eainternships.com. I hope it becomes the go-to board where people beginning to seriously engage with EA can find out what they can do within the effective altruism community
  • You can sign up for a bi-weekly newsletter here and express interest in a Slack integration here.
  • Submitting opportunities is a great way to make sure we don’t miss anything, or that more people can see the opportunity earlier. We’re especially keen for people to submit small opportunities only they and a small circle of others might know about.
  • Separately, I created a new database of organizations and initiatives either in EA or working on reducing x-risk.

A revamped collection of opportunities

EA Opportunities hosts an opportunity board and organization board. This post provides an update on the revamped opportunity board, while this related post describes the (EA) Organization database.[1]

The EA Opportunity board is an improvement built upon what used to be called the EA Internship board. The layout is roughly the same, but the opportunity board features a few noticeable improvements:

  • The focus of this board has broadened from internships to include volunteer opportunities, bootcamps, conferences, contests, and most other opportunities someone becoming more engaged with the EA community might be curious about.
    • Important note: This board does not feature full-time opportunities. The 80K Job Board has this covered. 
  • The target audience has changed from just undergraduates to people generally beginning to seriously engage with EA.
  • Board maintenance has improved. I have hired on a virtual assistant to spearhead opportunity entry and general maintenance.[2]
    • The virtual assistant, who is responsible for most data entry, doesn’t have a full understanding of EAs interpretation of aptitudes and cause areas and I occasionally approve opportunities too quickly to catch these. If you look hard enough, you will find mistakes on this board.]
  • New filters: You can now sort opportunities by which aptitudes they will allow you to develop or test your fit for
  • Newsletter and Slack automation to stay looped in: I’ve created a bi-weekly newsletter that will feature a subset of cool opportunities (sign up for Newsletter here) and a Slack automation that posts new approved opportunities to any slack channel (request Slack automation here).

Below, I answer some central questions about this board.

We regularly monitor and collect a wide range of opportunities, including internships, volunteer opportunities, conferences, and more. We want to be the go-to board for people interested in exploring what they can do within the effective altruism community short of a full-time position. Most of the opportunities featured are within EA organizations and initiatives, but we also feature entry-level opportunities from other organizations working on the most pressing problems.

How is this different from 80,000 Hours job board?

This opportunity board features opportunities that require less time or experience, while the 80,000 Hours Job Board focuses primarily on full-time positions, which we don't include. Our hope is that the opportunity board is more accessible to individuals new to the EA community. There is some overlap between the two boards though: like the 80,000 Hours Job board, we feature entry-level internships at EA organizations and other organizations working on the most pressing problems. 

What are some other EA opportunity collections?

We are certainly not the only source for EA opportunities (although we think we’ll be one of the best sources). Other opportunity collections include

How can I help improve this board?

You can help by submitting new opportunities, submitting new organizations or initiatives, and giving us feedback.

We would especially appreciate it if you submitted niche opportunities that would be easy to miss (e.g., Buck’s call for language model investigators, Rethink Priorities Nuclear research projects)

Acknowledgments

EA Internships was started by Emma Williamson and Sabrina Chwalek with minor support from me (Michel) and other collaborators. I have since taken revamped it into EA Opportunities, but without Emma and Sabrina this board likely wouldn’t exist. I’d also like to thank Jessy Williams for her continued help entering opportunities.

  1. ^

    I am separating this into two forum posts because the two boards have different target audiences and use cases. For example, the organization database might be used by grant-makers to let applicants know about organizations in their area of interest, and I want grant-makers to be able to post about the organization database without it being cluttered by information about the opportunity board.

  2. ^

     Two comments on the virtual assistant: (1) I have found hiring a virtual assistant very valuable and relatively painless. I think more EAs/ EA orgs should consider onboarding virtual assistants – see advice here. (2) You will find mistakes in the way some opportunities are tagged, especially in the early days of this revamped board.

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Thanks for your work on this! I imagine this will indeed be valuable. 

We would especially appreciate it if you submitted niche opportunities that would be easy to miss (e.g., Buck’s call for language model investigators, Rethink Priorities Nuclear research projects)

All collections of EA-relevant research questions which I'm aware of and which are publicly shareable are in A central directory for open research questions. So you could harvest that directory for other collections that seem sufficiently well-scoped/high-priority/packaged with a chance of light mentorship that it's worth including them in your site? And/or you could include a link to that directory on the site so people who are interested can poke around themselves based on their own interests, skills, and plans?

(Also, btw, the nuclear risk research projects post is based on work supported by RP but was posted in a personal capacity, and the offer of assistance for people who work on those things is from me rather than from RP. But that distinction is a bit murky and not very important, so it's fine by me if you don't make any edits based on that.)

I like the idea of featuring well-packed research questions, but I don't want to flood the board with them.

I am currently hiring a new director to execute on product improvement and outreach projects as I step into a more strategic advisor role. I'll sync with the new hire about featuring these research questions.

Most volunteer opportunities likely get mainly posted at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1392613437498240/

Thanks for the tip. I will start sourcing more regularly from here.

Thanks for doing this! I think it's worth specifying though in the post and in the website that the website does not include full-time positions. 

Saying "we include a wide range of non-full-time positions" doesn't convey that you don't include full-time positions, and people might wonder why full-time positions aren't here. I think it was clearer that it didn't include full-time positions when it was called the EA Internships Board.

Agree, I should make this more explicit. Made edits to reflect this change in this post and on the website.

I think actually you mean "permanent" vs "temporary", rather than "full-time" vs "part-time". 

I think a lot of the opportunities you do/will/should cover will either will be or can be full-time but just temporary, e.g. GovAI's fellowships are on your board and are intended as full-time, and CERI and SERI's fellowships can be done full-time and probably should be on your board when they next have openings. And I think your target audience is probably often constrained to not taking permanent things yet or not being (demonstrably) skilled enough to get into the relevant permanent things yet, but could do temporary things at a full-time load. 

So I suggested editing the phrasings in light of that in this post and (if the site says relevant things) on the site.

Seeing this late but appreciate the comment! I think this makes a valuable distinction I had oversimplified. Made some changes and will communicate this more clearly going forward.

Great, thanks!

Thank you for posting and putting this (and the other resources you've linked) together!

I'm very interested in developing the talent supply chain in the EA community and see a lot of value in these kinds of databases. However, the added value of a database can be much greater the more comprehensive it is, tempered by appropriate tagging for filterability -> it would be a nice goal to work towards integrating this database with the 80k Job Board database, as well as connecting more directly with EA Orgs to bridge the gap between supply and demand for talent and opportunities.

I cannot speak for the newly launched EA Hiring Network, but I hope to do some direct work building out the talent infrastructure of the EA ecosystem and believe there would be a long term strategic value to integrating all opportunities (full time, volunteer, training, internship - no need to limit by category so long as the tags allow for filtering) into a cohesive database in tandem with a talent database which would allow for much more efficient talent matching and allocation across EA orgs. 

While any progress in that direction would be at the soonest many months in the future, is collaborating on this kind of initiative something that you would be interested in? If so, I'd love to connect and discuss potential synergies :)

@Lee McC - EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)

 

Nice work! Just wanted to flag that the eaopp.com link is down for me. 

thanks for the flag! we’re working on fixing this now

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