College students: You should run a virtual summer EA Intro Fellowship ASAP. Here's how!

TL;DR: You should run a virtual summer Intro Program targeted at incoming freshmen. It's an easy way to boost an existing group or (re)start one. Most of the resources you need are already available, and I am here to help with planning or advice, even if you've never done any community building before!

Princeton EA already received over 130 sign-ups for their virtual summer 2026 Intro Fellowship – with 10 facilitators running 14 cohorts! Harvard, Brown, MIT, and other schools are testing the same model, and you should too!

First, some background: One year ago, in the summer of 2025, Yale EA advertised a Summer Introductory Fellowship. The results were highly promising. They started off the year noticeably stronger than many other EA groups, with regular attendance at weekly meetings, and a few summer participants joining the board early on.

Now, more schools are testing summer fellowships. I am extremely excited about this opportunity and think all university students should be too. Your group can get a huge head start by being organized enough to do it. It works best with incoming freshmen who are eager to make friends and don't have any existing ties to particular clubs on campus, which means you have first mover's advantage in trying to make a good impression on them.

This is a chance to turbocharge your group and bring fresh faces into the mix for next year. I think established groups should make this part of their standard repertoire. So far, the data suggest that summer fellowships tend to attract more applicants who take the fellowship more seriously (than at other times of the year).

And if your college's EA group has been dead for a while and you're lamenting how hard it is to rebuild, I think you should give a virtual summer Intro Fellowship an honest shot and mobilize in the next few weeks. (It's not too late! Even if you get a message out by mid-June, you could still have time for a 4- or 6-week fellowship.)

There is reason to believe it could be awesome, and it will feel satisfying and inspiring to start the year off already having group members who are excited to participate. Compare this to the alternative where you hustle like crazy the first few weeks of the semester, all while worrying about assembling a core group before other groups have claimed people’s time. 

What you'd need to do, in short:

1. Figure out where incoming freshmen are tuned in. What communication channels are they using?
2. Find a way to advertise in those channels. Copy/paste existing outreach materials.
3. Collect applications and filter lightly for people who seem excited to attend all the sessions.
4. Find facilitators for the cohorts – these can be alumni and professionals. The fact that the fellowship is virtual gives you lots of flexibility. You could also consider doing a joint program with another school and sharing their facilitator capacity.
5. Put participants into cohorts and send them logistical information about when and how to meet + the curriculum.
6. Run the sessions!

I expect that advertising and running the program would only take a few hours a week if you reuse existing materials. There are outreach message templates you can copy, and Intro Fellowship curricula are widely available. The main thing you'd need is self-motivation, and peers can help you with that – I can connect you with others running summer fellowships. The core skills of being a facilitator are being friendly and asking thoughtful questions. There are lots of resources to lean on, like CEA's guide to running Intro Programs.

Don't be intimidated if you don't have any co-organizers – you can scale up or down based on your capacity. Don't have official status at your school? You can register in the fall. You don't even need any facilitators of your own – organizers at schools with strong EA groups are often willing to facilitate for you, and people are willing to help you find more facilitators. None of these are barriers to setting up a summer fellowship.

I can give anyone interested a more detailed step-by-step guide on how to get started, and I'm available for 15-minute calls; I can walk you through the process if you're overwhelmed or just questioning if you're the right person to do this.

Why this matters

EA groups don't just happen. The default state without any activation energy is that no EA group exists at a school, and there is nowhere for altruistic, thoughtful people to congregate and discuss the best ways to make the world better through an unusually cause-agnostic lens with a wide moral aperture.

Groups are not just a place for people to meet: they are a place for learning and development. Getting involved with an EA group can and has meaningfully changed people's lives, which is why being a community builder (which can be as simple as setting this summer fellowship up) is incredibly powerful.

If you're reading this post and have any connection to a university, you can act on this information:

• If you're a current college student, you should contact me and get started right away!
• If you're an alumna, you can reach out to your alma mater's EA group and send them this post.
• If you know anyone in college who is interested in EA, you should encourage them to start organizing (and send them this post).

(If you take any of the above actions, let me know so I have a sense of the schools  involved.)

Preview image is a photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash