Running a Project-Based Intro Fellowship

This past term EA Northeastern’s London group revamped our Arete (ie. intro) fellowship in a few significant ways. This is how it went!

(tldr: We added a project into the intro fellowship and invested more time into personal relationships with fellows. We had lower drop out rates and higher engagement.^[1] You can see this google sheet if you want the numbers.)

If you want to compare our experience to yours here is some context:

• Our group is 3 years old.
• There’s appx. 2000 students at the London campus, all inclusive.
• Appx. 1250 of those at any given time are freshmen studying abroad from Boston.

The primary problems we had last year were:

1. Attendance drop off.
2. ‘Apprehensive’ participation in meetings.
3. Low engagement with the group (& EA) outside of the fellowship.

The following are changes that we made from last year to address them. 

We Added a Project

In order to address attendance, we added a workbook with new project sections. In redesigning the fellowship, we kept most of the OG CEA syllabus, with a few extra readings and workbook inspo from St Andrews. We made our own workbook that you can access here, and are welcome to use as a template.^[2] The most significant change was the addition of the ‘project sections,’ that, if done well, would hopefully make it pretty easy to put together a final project at the end. We also removed the last two weeks of the fellowship, and replaced them with a week to finalise their projects and ask questions, as well as a week for a final celebration and poster session! We're planning on revisiting the workbook topics to make some of the weeks more cohesive. If anyone is interested in seeing examples of the project, let me know!

We thought that the project would be a motivator in two ways:

1. Students seeking more agency or hands-on learning would remain interested.

2. Busier students, or students for whom the fellowship was a lower priority might also be more inclined to finish as they’ve already started a project.^[3]

Another reason for introducing the project was specific to Northeastern students. Northeastern is known for being pretty career oriented, and promotes ‘experiential’ learning. In my experience this has meant having a really good careers team, and lots of opportunities to go off campus for cool & relevant work experience. In my opinion, Northeastern’s main draw is their co-ops,^[4] which allow students to get college credit for doing work experience relevant to their major. For the most part, it seems like their career-sy branding attracts a lot of students who are uninterested in theory, and super interested in Direct Impact™. I received some feedback about the fellowship last year, and even from someone who dropped out this year, that it was too much like a plain old reading group. My worry in keeping the fellowship as-is was that we would be excluding our most agentic and promising students, so we added this more ‘hands-on’ element.

 I’m also unsure if the project was actually the catalyst for the low dropout rates this year, but we did in fact have lower attendance drop off! The feedback that we received about the project also suggests that we’re on the right track. We even had someone mention the project as their favourite part of the fellowship in our feedback survey. They said, 

“I loved working on the project at the end. Reflecting on what I had learned over the term of the fellowship, and honing in on something I wanted to build on really helped me engage with what we learned. Seeing everyone else's projects was also very exciting.” 

I’ll give them that £20 later.

That being said, I’m unsure how useful the project would be at other universities, as well as if it might intimidate students who would otherwise be ‘good’ EAs. However, my intuition is that appealing to the most agentic and altruistic students is also really good. I’m unsure how to mitigate this risk, but if you have ideas please let me know.

If people think it would be useful, I might write a follow-up post about the specifics of the project and ask for feedback on what you think we could improve. If that seems interesting or helpful please say so. We are only aware of a few other project based fellowships. Arcadia Impact is also running a project-oriented intro program called Impact Research Groups, which is even more hands-on than ours, and seems to be going really well so far. If anyone else tries/has tried a project-oriented fellowship (or uses our handbook) please tell me more about your experience!

We Designed New Marketing Materials

We also had increased participation in sessions this term. More people were regularly doing all of the readings, and they had a lot of nuanced and well researched opinions to express.

I think that these changes in our outreach strategy had something to do with this:

1. We put more effort into our marketing materials. We wanted the group to feel more substantial and look more polished. All posts, pamphlets, and posters had variations of the same design.^[5] 

2. We continued to market the fellowship as a high quality, high commitment program (which I think it was!).
3. We promised an end of term event where fellows would present their projects, and network with some cool EA professionals (and followed through!).

However, I’m still very unsure that this was the best strategy. It could be the case that we missed out on some promising and agentic fellows who were afraid of time commitment or thought the bar for applying was too high.

We Made more Friends (awww...)

Another thing that likely contributed to increased participation in meetings, as well as engagement with the group and with EA, was improving the general group 'vibes.'

There were two ways went about this:

1. Easy general structural things
2. More difficult friendship things

As far as easy changes go, we had larger and less cohorts. In previous years we capped our cohorts at 6 fellows. This year our groups ranged from 6-10 fellows, and we found that discussion flowed significantly better, and more people participated in conversations. It was also helpful for when fellows inevitably had to miss the odd meeting, as no one person had to pick up all the slack in discussion. I think we’ll keep doing this next term, but I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has had a different experience than us.

The more difficult thing to scale was the whole ‘friends’ bit. Until this term, we had never quite cracked how to foster non judgemental environments for conversation, and dare I say friendships, between our fellows. In the past, it was like pulling teeth trying to get fellows to engage with each other in meaningful ways. Not many fellows did the readings regularly, healthy conflict in groups was kept to a minimum, and the group dynamic was generally less than ideal.

One of the ways that we did this was by following in Kuhan’s footsteps, and we got to know Every Single Fellow personally. But of course the question isn’t whether or not you should be good friends with your group members and facilitate social interaction between them, but how do you go about it?

Here’s what we changed:

1. I added buffer time into my calendar before and after meetings to sit and chat with my fellows.
2. We made a conscious effort to ask fellows questions about themselves. Now if you asked me or my co-organisers about any of our fellows I could tell you their name, major, career goals, where they’re from, favourite cause areas, etc.
3. We made extra effort to hang out with them outside of the fellowship. This was especially on the part of my co-organiser Tili, who organised lots of pub nights, dinners, and study sessions!

Some of the really good things that came from this were:

1. A highly tailored program: We knew what each individual fellow needed. If relevant opportunities came up, I was able to send them to individual fellows without clogging inboxes. Our advice got to be relevant and non-general.

2. It gave me motivation: Knowing the fellows made me want to do the work more. I felt personally connected to the people involved and so I actively wanted to help them on top of knowing that doing the work was the right thing to do.^[6] It’s almost like job satisfaction improves performance or something……..

3. Fellows started inviting their other friends to join EA! We had lots of friends of fellows come to our end of term ‘GraduEAtion’ and celebrate with us. Lots of friends of fellows have also told me they’re applying for next term!
4. Fellows started engaging with EA outside of Northeastern, and across London. Many of our fellows attended events at the LISA and LEAH offices on our recommendations, and have now started seeking their own opportunities. Alicia Pollard, current Head of Groups at Arcadia Impact has also reported having multiple 1-1 bookings to discuss career opportunities and next steps with them.

I suppose that some mix of us making that initial effort and creating a good group dynamic led to the fellows hanging out on their own. We’ve essentially fostered a 40 person friend group that is maximising for impact, which is incredibly wholesome.

We Improved our Final Event

The last thing we did differently was our final event for the term: ‘GraduEAtion!’^[7] The point of this event was to give the fellows a platform to talk about their projects, and introduce them to some next steps in their EA journeys. We had time for the fellows and attendees to see each other’s work, as well as some talks from a few cool EA professionals. Big thanks to Alicia Pollard, Callum Hinchcliffe, Jenny Chapman, and Aaron Halpern for speaking!

I think how our final event went is pretty indicative of our term overall. We had about 60 attendees between fellows, their friends, and professionals. Our previous ‘GraduEAtion’ had <20 attendees, so I consider that a win!

The primary reason for high attendance at our event was probably that we made it mandatory for all fellows this time. However, the rest of the sign ups were from external students and professionals. These were a pleasant surprise, and probably came from a mix of the many outreach emails I sent, and recruitment from fellows themselves.

If you have capacity to plan a final event, I really recommend it for these reasons:

1. It was super wholesome. Everyone had a good time.
2. Our fellows got to meet cool professionals.
3. Cool professionals got to meet other cool professionals.

I generally feel good about how this term went. Next term I’d like to focus on keeping our post-intro fellows engaged, and guide them towards impactful paths. We’re currently in the planning stage for next term, and I’d be excited to hear from anyone who has created their own post-intro programming!

Big thanks to Alicia Pollard for reading this post and giving feedback!

1. ^{^}

    Unsure if it was statistically significant, waiting on our committee’s resident data scientist to take a look!

2. ^{^}

    Please have a think about whether you think the workbook is good, if it is right for your group or uni culture, and if you’re willing and able to devote the extra time that providing feedback on projects entails.

3. ^{^}

    There are some good arguments for letting people drop out of their own accord, but I’ve had the experience where less engaged fellows become more engaged with the introduction of new and interesting material. We’ve also had students who weren’t super engaged during the intro become more engaged during post-intro programming. I generally think it's better to get lots of people through the intro.

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 One of my co-organisers at the Boston campus recently came up with the idea to set up EA flavoured co-ops. If you have any leads on orgs that would be keen to host a Northeastern student please let us know!

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 We opted for a polished and professional (some might say ‘corporate’) design, but other unis have had similar success going for a ‘scrappier’ or grassroots-ey feel. I don’t think our experience is a one size fits all deal, and you should probably align your marketing strategy with your student demographic. Figuring this out takes a bit of trial and error in my experience.

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 As a sidenote, running this program has been incredibly rewarding on a personal level. I was able to see these people grow not only in their altruism, but as people and as friends! Wholesome!!

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 Credit to EA Blue (I think) for the name!!

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