TLDR: New undergraduate internship board here
What’s happening?
We’re excited to announce that the EA internships board is now live! As mentioned in our previous post, we hope to connect students to opportunities and provide them with funding for unpaid internships. You can view our board here. Feel free to comment with feedback.
What’s next?
A few things:
- Continuous internship updates.
- We’ll be updating our board weekly with new and relevant opportunities. You can help by adding relevant opportunities here.
- Apply for funding section coming soon
- We’ll be opening our ‘apply for funding’ section of the website soon. We’ll likely post again on the forum when this is ready.
- EA Professionals - apply to lead an undergraduate intern on a project of your choosing.
- More details on this coming soon; we’ll have a forum post on it in the coming weeks.
How can I help?
- Add relevant summer opportunities to our board here
- Comment below with feedback
- Reach out to Emma Williamson (emma123@stanford.edu) and Sabrina Chwalek (sabrina_chwalek@brown.edu) to get further involved with the project
Acknowledgments:
Thanks to Michel Justen, Lenni Justen, Emma Dolan, Adam Krivka, Patricio Ortiz, Sanat Singhal, Danya Adib, and Mason Zhang for their help with this project.
I would recommend using a custom domain instead of the proy.app subdomain. Even if you just have the custom domain redirect to the pory.app so that you can share the link around and if you change away from Pory then you control the domain and don't have dead links everywhere.
... Yes, I have made this mistake.
Agreed, and I'd just add that it's better to set up a proper custom domain rather than just a redirect, since a bunch of people will inevitably copy the post-redirect URL around, even if the EA team themselves are careful to only link to the custom domain. It's a 2 minute job - just need to log into the domain management where effectivealtruism.org is registered and add a CNAME record that points internships.effectivealtruism.org to ea-internships.pory.app
This looks great! I'm concerned that it won't get the traffic it needs to be useful to people. Have you considered/attempted reaching out to 80K to put a link on the job board or something? That's my go-to careers resource, and I think the main way I could learn about the existence of something like this once this post is off the front page.
We haven't reached out yet but that's a great idea and we're planning on it!
Thank you, this is amazing work! This will be very helpful to share with our intro fellows who are interested in internships this summer.
I'm glad to see this project go live, as I (and other people) have frequently griped about so many job boards seeming to focus on positions that required experience that I, as a recent college graduate do not have.
At the same time, I'd like to reiterate/reemphasize my comment from the previous post on this project: I would strongly recommend going beyond simply providing a list of high-impact, highly-competitive positions that people like younger me probably would have looked at and said “I’ll focus on applying for these positions,” only to end up being systemically under-qualified/competitive and not get anything. For example, you could include on the site some kind of link to advice that basically says things like "don't just apply for these positions; also apply for less-competitive internships even if they aren't directly EA related or even if they aren't directly related to your field." (This is where some of the non-EA organization suggestions I've had in mind might come into play.)
While I'm supportive of gathering this position information in one place, I could also see it as having potential drawbacks if it causes people to over-focus on these positions: I could totally see myself (someone who has struggled for years with mediocre success to get experience in the fields I'm pursuing) falling into that trap.
On a related note, my general impression has been "if you can manage to get a position in a high-impact area early in your career, that's great, but the reality is that most positions won't themselves directly lead to high impact; the key is the experience, professional connections, and future application material you get from such positions."
Hi Harrison,
Thanks for your comment! I definitely agree that only featuring highly-competitive internships is suboptimal and that this can lead people to feel discouraged and demotivated. I'm also sympathetic to Holden's aptitudes framework and that most of the value of internships isn't the direct work, but the experience, connections, and insights you gather. And in many cases, getting a less competitive internship might better help you skill-build and test your fit for a career path.
However, I think this advice is also very dependent on what career path someone is pursuing. While it's easier to build career capital for roles in policy, operations, management, academic research, etc. outside of the EA community, it's harder to gain comparable career capital in AI safety/meta-EA/x-risk roles outside of the EA community. I also have concerns about people using motivated reasoning to justify how an unrelated internship is helping them build skills/aptitudes.
We're also hoping to use the website to highlight some bootcamps/entry-level opportunities in the EA community that wouldn't otherwise be featured on the 80k job board (e.g. like AI Safety Camp or Phil Trammel's summer course). And we hope the third phase of our project will expand the number of entry-level internships available to young people in the community.
Overall though, I'd love to add an advice page with similar things to what you mentioned above!
This is cool! I've added it to the forum sidebar so that it gets more visibility. Let me know if you would like the text to be different – I wasn't sure what the official name of your project is.
Iff it's not too much effort, can include as filters:
- Location: US / Europe / Remote / Other
- Funding provided
We've had a few people request these filters so we should be adding them within the next week!
Filters are now added :)
Thank you so much for this tool, it looks very valuable!
A small problem I get at the moment: If I choose any location, it gives me "Unknown field names: remote opportunity?. Please ensure that the field exists and is not incorrectly mapped."
Thanks for flagging that—should be fixed now.
Awesome!
Some other organizations worth sharing on your website and/or getting their job board entries from are:
Thanks so much for the resources—adding them to our website now!
As a not-student with self-funding who is looking for things to try, is this board also for me?
Thank you for making this job board! I'll find it very useful. Can I suggest you organise a mailing list, in the same vein as the 80,000 Hours Job board mailing list? I think it's most important to touch on the most promising internships you've recently added. I find it really helpful to get email reminders like that.