I ran a retreat for EA Bath (9 people) 2nd to 5th June. Here are my thoughts and reflections.

If you would like any of the materials mentioned here, message me!

https://kashedtakes.substack.com/p/reflections-on-the-ea-bath-retreat Crossposted from my Substack!

Structure

The first two days (Tuesday evening -> Thursday morning) were for ‘EA’ and the last day was for fun (this reflected how we used the budget too -- last day was self funded).

In the first two days, the sessions we ran were

• Red teaming EA
• Career planning
• Semester planning
• Handover
• Lightning talks

And I gave an intro talk, and a talk on Agency, Taking Risks, and Building Habits.

Thoughts

Career planning & goal setting

Usefulness: 7/10

We used St Andrews’ career planning workbook for this -- I think it was definitely useful for getting people (myself included) to think about their cause prioritisation. It also allowed people to think about what skills they would enjoy using in their future job.

The most useful part was allowing people to set concrete tasks for their summer break -- I’ve noticed it’s very easy to have a vague goal of what you want to get out of the summer, but not having any concrete steps to achieve this.

However, I would’ve really liked for people to get started on their projects / tasks at the retreat, but the WiFi was incredibly bad (maximum 1mbps), so this made it hard for people to apply to fellowships, etc.

Red teaming EA

Usefulness: 6/10

This session was pretty fun; it got everyone chatting and being able to voice their critiques in EA freely, which I think was useful. I do think some of the problems we came up with were real, and are very hard to solve. E.g. there is a pretty big gender split in EA, and it can be pretty intimidating sometimes. I also think it was useful to have this session on the first day of the retreat as it was a good ice breaker. I did however run this session instead of 1-1s / speed updating, which maybe was a mistake. I think I would definitely recommend prioritising 1-1s in the future, especially if the participants don’t know each other very well. But... a lot of the members (myself included) were tired of 1-1s straight after EAG London.

Semester planning & Handover

Usefulness: 9/10

I thought this was a really useful session, and the feedback form also reflected this view. The way we ran it was having a sheet of A3 paper and we drew out our theory of change, and back-chained to figure out what programs/sessions we could run to achieve our goals. Having a mixture of old committee and new committee was useful as we got a good diversity of ideas, and it helped the new committee to see how the old committee had thought about the year before.

The most useful part was having a sheet split into sections with everyones names and their role, and then going through the different responsibilities and work that was required to run EA Bath. People were able to choose what tasks sounded appealing to them, and get an idea for what their role would actually look like!

Lightning Talks

Usefulness: 7/10

This semester we ran Effective Thesis Accelerator. As the final output, I asked people to create a short presentation on what they had researched, and to present it at the retreat. This was good because:

• It allowed people to have a concrete output from the program we ran
• It boosted peoples public speaking confidence, in a comfortable setting of 9 people
• It was super low effort for me to organise, but was engaging & nicely spread out over the 3 days

Agency, Taking Risks and Building Habits

Usefulness: 5/10

Some failure modes I didn’t anticipate:

• Talking at people about being more agentic probably doesn’t increase their agency.
• Getting people to note down their goals is useful but you shouldn’t repeat it across sessions!
• Talking about too many methods of increasing agency / building habits is probably overwhelming and doesn’t allow the audience to get a sense of what is the most important thing to implement.

I think it may have been better to get people to read through the blog posts I used as inspiration and then discuss which things they can implement their life & how they would go about it.

Or also to get people just started on Doing The Thing, but alas the WiFi was bad.

Food, Transport, Logistics etc

• We did a massive grocery shop on the day of the retreat, as the house was a bit far from civilisation. If we didn’t have a car, this would’ve been very difficult.
• We had to shuttle people from the train station to the house as we only had one car -- this was slightly inconvenient.
• I think it was nice to be in the countryside as it was peaceful, but having no public transport options made it annoying to go anywhere nice on the last day.

My Key Takeaways

• If you have planned for activities requiring good WiFi, then book a place with good WiFi
• Apply for a grant months in advance -- ours only got approved the day before the retreat which lead to a lot of stress
• For handover purposes it could be cool to get the new organisers to run some of their own sessions
• Have ‘backup’ sessions in case something goes wrong -- e.g. on the Thursday morning as we didn’t have very good WiFi, we all read a blog post^[1] and discussed it -- I think it went well & people enjoyed this!
• Do 1-1s!
• Use the Groups Resources Centre, it is incredible
• Use Claude to speed up prep -- I would give Claude a bare bones presentation with blocks of text on it, and it would refine it and make it more visually pleasing etc. This saved me hours of work.
• I think 9 was too few people because a) everyone knew each other and b) I think it’s generally good to meet more people and have a greater diversity of takes, and so members could’ve possibly gotten more value from combining with another university group.
• I think it would be nice to get a guest speaker in -- I have no good reasons for why I didn’t reach out to anyone apart from being nervous to!
• We rented a projector for one week (<£4). This was massively useful for presentations, and I highly recommend!
• Most of the value of this retreat came from
  • Planning out summer to dos
  • Semester planning, role assigning & handover
  • Having somewhere to relax after exams and EAG

1. ^{^}

   My favourite blog post of all time!