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CEA’s University Groups Team is working on supporting university groups focused on EA ideas, and their organizers. We wrote more about our mission and vision last year here - note it is slightly outdated. Our team currently consists of Jessica McCurdy (team lead), Jake McKinnon, and Joris Pijpers[2].
In this post we share what we’ve been working on this summer, including launching new rounds of UGAP & OSP, a summit, an internship program, and more. We won’t touch much upon what we did in spring ‘23[3] (but have a retrospective of UGAP fall ‘22 here), and have also chosen to not expand in detail on why we are focusing on these programs and not others, in favor of getting the post out sooner. Additionally, we are still in the process of deeper impact analysis[4]. We hope to publish more details on these in the future.
Overall, we are pretty happy with what we were able to achieve this summer and are excited about future directions.
We think university groups have the potential to be especially promising places to introduce people to EA ideas, and then help them learn more about and act on them:
We think top universities, such as those previously listed as focus universities, have a high concentration of top talent. That means that we extend higher touch support to top universities and have some programming focused on them specifically (like our summit and residencies). However, the majority of talented, altruistic and greatly influential people do not come from top universities. Therefore we think scalable support (like UGAP & OSP) which includes both top and non-top universities is also worthwhile. We have many examples of people who are doing work that we think is really important, who did not come from top universities, and might have not gotten involved with EA ideas if it wasn’t for their university group. We also think people that we help from these universities tend to be particularly counterfactual.
Separately, we should note that EA is a rapidly changing ecosystem. Changes to bottlenecks in key priorities and cultural norms within EA influence our programming and focus. We are regularly reflecting on what the current landscape means for our programming. This means we might seem to be changing our focus and programming more than one might expect[5].
The University Group Accelerator Program (UGAP) is a remote program that helps to make starting new EA university groups easy and accessible. We provide students with a mentor, digital resources (e.g. an outreach guide), training, and sometimes a stipend. Since the start of the program in 2021, we have supported over 200 group organizers, coming from every populated continent. This round, we have organizers participating in UGAP from schools including IIT Bombay, University College Dublin, University of Florida, University of Sao Paulo, University of Warwick, and many more.
The Organizer Support Program (OSP) is a mentorship program aimed at university EA group organizers to help them prepare for the start of the semester. Similarly to UGAP, it provides student group organizers with a mentor, resources and training, but no stipend. We ran a very low touch pilot of OSP in the ‘22 spring semester, as we noticed pre-existing EA university groups can also benefit from resources and mentorship - especially if there’s a lot of new organizers running the group. We have now also accepted a few AI safety groups, to explore if our programs are able to add value for those groups. This round, we have organizers participating in OSP from schools including Stanford University, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Harvard University, Cambridge, Delft University of Technology, the University of Hong Kong, and many more.
Want to be notified when new rounds of UGAP or OSP open? Sign up here!
This summer, we wrapped up the spring ‘23 rounds of UGAP and OSP, and made a number of improvements to both programs. You can find a short retrospective, which includes an overview of what improvements we made, in Appendix 1. We share a breakdown of participants by country in Appendix 2.
This summer, we launched the fall ‘23 rounds of UGAP and OSP:
Again, we share a breakdown of participants by country in Appendix 2.
Due to the decrease in funding in the space, our bar for organizers that we support has gone up. This means that some organizers, who in an ideal world we would like to support, do not receive support from us. Application processes are not perfect, and sometimes we make mistakes in both directions. We are planning on reevaluating our bar this winter based on how correlated our evaluations of applications are with organizer outcomes. Our selection criteria are similar to that of the Open Philanthropy University Organizer Fellowship, though since our support is less money intensive and more introductory, we usually have a slightly lower bar than them.
In May, ahead of EAG London, we hosted a group organizer summit in collaboration with CEA’s Partner Events Team (thank you to michel for all his work on this!). The retreat aimed to bring together (mostly) experienced university group organizers from established EA university groups, such as those previously listed as focus universities. More specifically, the goals of the summit were to facilitate lasting coordination between organizers at established groups, help organizers improve their group’s strategy by learning from guests and their peers, and to kick-off collaborative projects and spark more enthusiasm for EA uni group organizing.
Despite a relatively low LTR compared to similar events, our best guess is that this event created important coordination and relationships that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, like a workshop for AIS organizers, more coordination on residencies, and more communication between group organizers. However, we think there are various things we can do to make future versions of similar events go better. Appendix 3 includes some potential improvements for future similar events.
Our team hosted a summer internship. We received over 100 applications, and ended up making 7 total offers. Five people accepted an offer (four of which ended up working with our team, and one with the Virtual Programs (VP) team), one person accepted another opportunity but will contract with us part-time for the foreseeable future, and the other also chose another opportunity but now works with us as a UGAP/OSP mentor. We also passed on promising applications to other teams at CEA, which led to one more person interning with the VP team.
What our interns focused on:
As part of CEA’s group support funding, the CEA University Groups Team gives out grants for expenses of EA university groups.
We consciously made the decision to run quite a lot of programs this summer, which meant that we did not have a lot of slack time to jump on potential new opportunities, focus on improving our object-level understanding of problems in the world, or engage in more communication with group organizers. In hindsight, we think this was roughly the correct decision for this summer, but going forward we want to improve our responsiveness if we were to again opt in to having a high predetermined workload.
With the help of various stakeholders and group organizers, we brainstormed a lot of potential projects. Of course, we unfortunately don’t have the capacity to run them all, but here[9] are some things we would be interested to see in the space by us or by others.
We’re currently figuring out what our priorities should be for the upcoming ~9 months. We think that the following are among the areas we are most likely to focus our efforts on:
We’d be excited to hear your ideas on what we should focus on next. In general, if you have any questions, ideas, or feedback, reach out to us on [email protected]! Thank you for your continuous support :)
This summer, we wrapped up the (northern hemisphere) spring ‘23 rounds of UGAP and OSP. Some key stats:
To improve our programs, we’re always gathering feedback from participants, mentors and stakeholders. Based on feedback on our spring ‘23 round, we made the following edits:
| UGAP spring ‘23 | OSP spring ‘23 | UGAP fall ‘23 | OSP fall ‘23 | |||||
| part. | groups | part. | groups | part. | groups | part. | groups | |
| Total | 33 | 26 | 70 | 57 | 43 | 29 | 68 | 52 |
| By country: | ||||||||
| Australia | – | – | 2 | 2 | – | – | 3 | 3 |
| Belgium | – | – | – | – | – | – | 1 | 1 |
| Brazil | 1 | 1 | – | – | 3 | 2 | – | – |
| Canada | 2 | 1 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 3 |
| Chile | – | – | 2 | 1 | – | – | 5 | 1 |
| Colombia | – | – | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Denmark | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Finland | 3 | 2 | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Germany | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Ghana | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – | 1 | 1 |
| Hong Kong | – | – | – | – | – | – | 2 | 1 |
| Hungary | – | – | – | – | 2 | 1 | – | – |
| India | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 8 | 5 | – | – |
| Indonesia | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – |
| Israel | – | – | – | – | 1 | 1 | – | – |
| Italy | – | – | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | – | – |
| Japan | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Kenya | – | – | 1 | 1 | – | – | 1 | 1 |
| Mexico | – | – | – | – | 2 | 1 | – | – |
| Netherlands | 3 | 2 | 8 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 10 | 5 |
| Nepal | – | – | – | – | – | – | 1 | 1 |
| New Zealand | – | – | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Nigeria | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – |
| Norway | – | – | 3 | 1 | – | – | – | – |
| Philippines | – | – | 3 | 2 | – | – | 4 | 3 |
| Poland | – | – | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Singapore | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – | 1 | 1 |
| Sweden | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | – | – | – | – |
| Switzerland | – | – | – | – | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Turkey | – | – | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | – | – |
| Uganda | – | – | – | – | – | – | 1 | 1 |
| United Kingdom | 3 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 3 | 8 | 7 |
| United States | 7 | 6 | 22 | 20 | 4 | 4 | 21 | 18 |
Summer in the northern hemisphere, that is
We are part of CEA’s Groups team, and also work with contractors who help us
Note that spring in the northern hemisphere is fall in the southern hemisphere, and vice versa. For brevity, we’ll refer to the northern hemisphere seasons/semesters in this post
As a sneak peak, we are collecting information on significant actions such as whether someone has been interviewed for an EA organization, worked full time at an EA organization, gotten 80k career advising, taken the GWWC pledge and more. Early data suggests that the GWWC pledges and 80k calls taken by even a small portion of respondents justify the costs of our programs alone, but there are many tricky counterfactuals we are working with here. GWWC pledges and 80k are also not the main things we are tracking
For instance, we are aware of the increasing interest in people able to fill more senior positions. We still think targeting university students is valuable, but could be convinced to decrease our focus there
Unfortunately, we don’t accept all applicants to our programs. We sometimes reject participants because they hand in an incomplete application, or because we think community building might not be their comparative advantage, but most applicants get rejected because we believe they are not sufficiently able or comfortable at talking about complicated EA ideas yet and should probably learn more first
Our OSP acceptance rate is higher than that for UGAP for a few reasons: we marketed OSP less publicly, OSP has no stipend, OSP mentorship can be capped at 3 weeks (which means it takes less resources), and people applying to OSP are generally more experienced
We don’t think LTR is the best way to measure value or impact, but we find it useful in comparing programs over time and measuring user satisfaction
Note this comes from an internal brainstorm, so the document is not very polished
We are aware of branding considerations around CEA supporting AIS groups, and are keeping this in mind as we explore ways to improve this space
We also asked about overall satisfaction, with average ratings being a 7.92 for UGAP and 7.29 for OSP
There are two problems with comparing these numbers: firstly, we asked participants for a likelihood to recommend their mentor in the spring ‘23 survey, but for their overall satisfaction with their mentor in the fall ‘23 survey. Secondly, the 3rd week survey for the fall ‘23 round came earlier in the semester than the mid-semester survey for the spring ‘23 round
