Building a Campus EA Group in No Time (Resources for Students!)

In my view, starting or growing university EA groups is one of the best opportunities to do good while in school. As a grad student working part time at Coefficient Giving, I believe that (per hour) time spent building our EA Group has been similarly impactful to grantmaking work. I’m proud to have been part of the organizing team which revitalized Princeton’s EA group into an active community, with a dozen members spending their summers at high-impact orgs and 150 students involved in our 8-week summer learning program. 

I suspect there are a number of students who are interested in EA but already have other commitments and feel overwhelmed by the prospect of growing a club alone.^[1] If you can relate, I’m glad you’re reading this. 

I hope this post conveys that important university organizing work can be manageable and fun for busy students. I think community building can even support one’s own career opportunities. I also tried to include advice that I would have benefitted from learning before I got started.

Tl;dr recommendations

• Research course options. The specific classes you choose may determine your availability for extracurricular leadership (including building an EA group).
• Ask for help organizing. Two ways to find co-organizers are by posting on class pages/groupchats, and searching for classmates on LinkedIn who follow EA pages.
• Publicize your group frequently at the very beginning of the school year, when students are most open to joining new clubs. Look for university-wide distribution channels like residential college emails lists where possible.
  • Feel free to repurpose material from this doc with all of the emails Princeton EA sent last year, and the logistics, presentations, and facilitator prep we used for our intro to EA discussion program.
• Encourage classmates interested in summer internships with impactful nonprofits to seek funding from the university for volunteer work, then post on platforms like the EA Forum or EA Anywhere Slack about seeking summer volunteer opportunities.
• Act with integrity. Community building success is relational, gradual, and downstream of mutual trust and respect.

Other resources

• The Center for Effective Altruism Organizer Support Program and Groups Resource Center
• Network for EA Support and Training (NEST), a post about funding and mentorship, and a partnership with Scott Alexander for university EA groups to host ACX meetups
• Additional resources for discussions and social events
• My email if you have any questions (sa9156[at]princeton.edu)

Making school more manageable

My personal experience has been that employers aren’t too concerned with the specific classes students take. In my view, employers may care about GPA and major (though for most roles major doesn’t matter much), your work experience, and your extracurricular leadership.

I’m confident that high-impact organizations are excited when students organize impactful clubs successfully; group organizing is important, and doing it well is a legible indicator of a student’s aptitudes and mission-alignment. All else equal, I suspect that many high-impact orgs would prefer to hire someone who did a great job organizing their school’s EA group and got a 3.7 GPA as a music major than someone who got a 3.8 in quantum physics and had no EA engagement.

I recommend using Ratemyprofessors.com and noting the “difficulty” rating for professors with a large sample of ratings (though the “quality” rating is important for your own happiness!) Even better if you can read through the qualitative reviews to get a sense of a class’ time commitment. You could use a prompt like the following on Claude: Please look up all of the professors on this fall course list on RateMyProfessors and organize them by difficulty and quality ratings.

You could also post Fizz asking if upperclassmen have taken certain classes and what the time commitment was like. In my experience, the classes that take the most time are those that assign lots of readings. I think speed-reading the materials and asking an LLM a few questions to confirm you understand the key points can save a considerable amount of time.^[2]

I also recommend asking upperclassmen for their advice about your major/interests. E.g:

• You may be able to switch your grading for classes to pass-fail until the last week or two of the semester. This is good to know from the outset so that you can plan around this opportunity.
• You may be able to take student-taught classes for credit. This can be a great experience, and require considerably less work than professor-taught classes.
• With a fixed budget of hours, you may find that going to office hours or TA review sessions for 1:1 mentorship better meets your goals than going to lecture classes (particularly if attendance/participation isn’t graded).

My view is that you can lean into what you find interesting. For the classes you’re enjoying, you should take every opportunity to learn. But for a brutal calculus requirement or an organic chemistry gen-ed, you may prefer to spend less time on school and instead do the things that make you happy. I think it is valid to choose happiness.^[3]

Asking for help organizing

Getting help organizing your group is one of the highest leverage ways to take pressure off yourself, make organizing more fun, and enable your group to have more impact. The first step to getting help is reaching out to others.

If you are starting a brand new group or reviving a group that was largely inactive the previous year, you can post in university or class-wide groupchats (Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack etc), saying you’re excited to start a club and you’d love to connect with other students who are interested in EA or doing good broadly about working together to launch it.  

Another place to look for co-organizers is on LinkedIn for users who have joined EA groups (e.g, 80,000 Hours), or for anyone from your school who follow EA-related public figures. 

• To do the latter, search the name of your school in the search bar, then click “People”, then click “all filters”. Then scroll down to “followers of” and type in EA influencers (I recommend starting with Rutger Bregman, since he has the largest LinkedIn presence.) 
  
  Then when you’ve found other current students at your university, you can send them a friendly message (either on LinkedIn, or through your university email platform) asking if they’re interested in hopping on a brief call to help start the club!

If you’re at a school that had a group last year but you are the only organizer for this year, I recommend reaching out individually to group members who could be great organizers! People love getting messages that make them feel valued, and they’ll probably be excited about the potential impact of organizing too.^[4]

If you’re at a school with a well-established group and other co-organizers already, asking for help might mean working with your co-organizers to scope out specific functions or projects for other group members to own. These can include:

• Core organizers to run learning fellowships, support career planning, conference and internship applications.
• A communications specialist to advertise the group on social media accounts, draft emails, manage tabling at and outside the club fairs, etc.
• A fun activity organizer to set up game nights, retreats and other group bonding.
• An events chair to set up guest speakers talks, and cross-club coordination for joint events with related student groups like AI alignment, vegan society, climate groups and other service clubs.
• A treasurer to apply for group funding from the university and help group members navigate the process of securing university funding for volunteer internships with impactful organizations.
  • Here is a sample list of university funding. A few schools (Duke, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Harvard, UChicago, Dartmouth, Cornell, Berkeley and Tufts) have particularly easy processes for seeking summer funding.
• A special projects lead to organize impactful actions that the group can do, e.g, meeting with your school’s administration about starting high-impact university-affiliated institutes like SERI, advocating for a for-credit class to be taught on EA ideas (e.g, Practical Ethics), making a book like 80k’s career guide or Doing Good Better the school-sponsored summer “pre-read”.

Starting the year with a plan, and hitting the ground running!

I recommend reading this post on the importance of the start of the school year. In short, students (particularly freshmen) are much more open to joining new clubs at the start of fall than any other time of year. This makes it the best time to promote your group!

I'd also recommend looking into whether your school offers platforms where clubs can reach a large proportion of the student body (e.g, listservs, residential colleges or department mail forwarding) who have opted into receiving messages from student groups.^[5]

You and your co-organizers may also benefit from mapping out a calendar of monthly goals. Below is the rough plan we have in mind for Princeton EA:

Indicators of success

University EA groups aim to help students discover and pursue ideas about helping others effectively. One of the main ways students can improve the world is through their careers, however it can be challenging to measure how your group is doing while members are still in school. As intermediary goals, you might track:

• Email list signups.
• Attendance at weekly meetings and social events.
• Applications, and ultimately attendees, at conferences and retreats.
• Applications, and ultimately recipients, of career advice.
• Individuals applying and starting at impactful summer internships and full time jobs.
• Graduates who stay engaged with EA (e.g, respond to emails you send about opportunities for pursuing impactful work).
• Engaged organizers.
• Succession (at least 2-3 lead organizers confirmed for the following year).
• The group’s discussion quality and inclusiveness. Ideally:
  • Group members feel comfortable asking questions when they don’t understand something, think for themselves, reflect on what they believe, and apply the EA mindset to the broader world.
  • Group members with different goals or causal focuses feel like they belong.
  • There are a mix of people who feel bought into “hardcore EA” and people still coming around to EA. Organizers and other group members are accepting of those who are still learning, and those who don’t bite every bullet.
  • Every member, particularly the group leaders, acts with integrity and kindness. Organizers are the types of people who their peers want to be around, and they show that the EA group is inclusive, ambitious, truthful and open-minded.

Closing thoughts on organizing

Students are unusually open-minded. Most don’t have a mortgage or other sunk costs preventing them from pursuing impactful work. (I think) EA ideas are intrinsically compelling and speak for themselves. By merely making someone aware of EA ideas, you create the opportunity for these ideas to change their life. If you cause someone to pursue an impactful career who would not have otherwise, you may have doubled your lifetime impact.

I don’t think it matters who does good. I think people already in important roles -- or who have a lot of EA context -- tend to overestimate their own long term impact relative to others who aren’t as far along yet. Everyone starts somewhere. I think it’s hard to predict where impact will come from, and that anyone who pursues impactful work over the long term has the potential to change the world. There is an enormous amount of money coming into EA, and there has never been a greater need for talent to enable this funding to best help others.

I believe that the most successful university EA groups are those that develop students’ personal values and care for doing good effectively.^[6] Towards this goal, I think organizers can:
1) Help students connect with the broader EA community (via in-person events and career opportunities) to build lasting social connections. 
2) Make EA accessible. EA values will feel right to some and not others; I recommend giving everyone the opportunity to engage with these ideas, then building deeper relationships with the people who show the most excitement.
3) Act with integrity. Most people associate ideas with those who share them, and the decency and virtue group leaders demonstrate can have an outsized impression on the group’s members and long-term reputation.

1. ^{^}

    In college, I didn’t even think to start an EA group despite being excited about EA ideas and attending a school that didn’t have a group.

2. ^{^}

   It’s against certain class policies to have AI summarize readings for you, but not usually against the policy to check your understanding of readings with AI by asking it questions. Doing so can help you feel confident in the materials after just one pass.

3. ^{^}

   You can also pursue self-directed learning (e.g, through your EA group, using Claude as a tutor, via Youtube or podcasts, work experience, etc), which for me has been more practical and enjoyable than what I learn in most classes. 

^{^}

Anecdotally, I reached out to 12 Princeton EA members about spending 2 hours per week per cohort facilitating our summer fellowship. 9 of them said yes, including a few who are organizing multiple cohorts.

^{^}

At Princeton, learning about HoagieMail (which clubs use to message most undergraduates) was the single biggest game-changer for our reach.

^{^}

Some students may drop out to do full time impactful work. Some students may get EA jobs straight after graduating college. But for the most part, the impact of university EA groups will come from people who are passionate about EA doing high-impact work further along in their career. Many professionals who were a part of their university EA groups found their way to an impactful job years after college. Even among those who start doing impactful work during or after college, they’ll likely have most of their impact later in their career when they have more responsibility and experience.

Show all footnotes