Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
by High Impact Professionals
3 min read 2

22

Building effective altruismCareer choiceOpportunities to take actionAnnouncements and updatesApplication announcementsFellowships and internshipsHigh Impact Professionals (organization)
Frontpage

High Impact Professionals is excited to announce that applications are now open for the Fall 2024 round of our Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). The IAP is a 6-week program designed to equip experienced (mid-career/senior) EA-aligned professionals (not currently working at a high-impact organization) with the knowledge and tools necessary to make a meaningful impact and empower them to start taking actionable steps right away. 

To date, the program’s high action focus has proven to be successful:

  • 33% of participants have transitioned into high-impact careers, including joining Charity Entrepreneurship and roles in AI Safety;
  • a further 33% are taking concrete actions toward high-impact careers, including volunteering at EA-aligned orgs; and 
  • many participants are donating a meaningful percentage of their annual salary to effective charities, with several having taken the 🔶 10% Pledge or 🔷 Trial Pledge.

We are currently running the Summer 2024 round, which features the program’s largest number of participants and cohorts.

We’re pleased to open up this new Fall 2024 program round, which will start the week of October 28. More information is available below and here. 

Please apply by September 5.

Apply now

Program Objectives

The IAP is set up to help participants:

  • identify paths to impact, 
  • take concrete, impactful actions, and
  • join a network of like-minded, experienced, and supportive impact-focused professionals.

At the end of the program, a participant should have a good answer to the question “How can I have the most impact with my career, and what are my next steps?”, and they should have taken the first steps in that direction.

Program Overview

Important Dates

  • Program duration: 6 weeks (week of October 28 – week of December 2, 2024)​
  • Deadline to apply: September 5 
Apply now

Format

  • Weekly individual work (2–3 hours). A mix of:
    • Learning: Reading resources on how to think about and prioritize different options for impact
    • Doing: Taking impactful actions, such as developing your own personalized impact plan and taking concrete steps to begin implementing it
  • Virtual group sessions (1.5 hours of discussions and coaching)
    • Includes mastermind sessions where each member of the cohort has the opportunity to present their plans, obstacles, and uncertainties and get in-depth, tailored feedback
  • 1-on-1 sessions with IAP facilitators
  • Extracurricular sessions: The possibility of extra sessions on topics defined by the needs of the cohort (e.g., financial considerations, networking)
  • Post-program support sessions: Access additional group sessions in the months following the program, as well as regular alumni sessions, to maintain momentum and continue implementing your plan

Topics covered

  • Values and mission – determine your motivations / guiding principles, strengths, and weaknesses to set a clear starting point for your journey
  • Paths to impact for professionals – explore the landscape of career possibilities, address your key uncertainties, and identify your best career and impact options
  • Develop an action plan – put all you’ve discovered into a roadmap with actionable steps to guide you to your impact goals
  • Implement your plan – Begin taking active steps to turn your plan into an impactful reality

Led by: Select members of the High Impact Professionals team/community

Why Should You Apply?

  • Overcome Barriers: We'll guide you in exploring your personal obstacles to impact and assist you in taking real-world, impactful actions.
  • Understand Impact: Delve into the complex nature of creating positive change and discover the diverse opportunities available to professionals.
  • Develop and Implement a Solid Impact Plan: Acquire tools to assess and plan for impact, and integrate them into your own circumstances to create a personal roadmap for maximizing your positive influence. Then, begin taking concrete steps to put your plan into action.
  • Connect with Like-Minded People: Embark on this journey alongside others who share similar goals and aspirations, fostering a supportive community of impact-oriented professionals.
  • Get a Boost in Our Talent Directory: If you successfully go through our program, your profile in our Talent Directory will be marked as such, signaling to potential employers that you’ve taken steps toward having more impact.

Who Should Apply?

We're looking for motivated, results-driven, experienced mid-career/senior EA-aligned professionals (not currently working at a high-impact organization) who aspire to maximize their impact and are seeking guidance in navigating the path to achieving it.

You'll likely get the most value from the program if you:

  • are a mid-career or senior professional,
  • are not currently working at a high-impact organization,
  • have contemplated how you can do the most good, and
  • haven't yet taken many significant steps in that direction.

Please note that the above are guidelines. Therefore, if you feel you'd benefit from the program but don't think you fit the criteria, please apply anyway!

We look forward to receiving your application and helping you make a lasting difference in the world.

Apply now

Questions?

If you have any questions or comments, please see the FAQ section of the IAP page and also feel free to reach out to us in the comments or via our website.

22

2
0
1

Reactions

2
0
1

More posts like this

Comments2


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Denkenberger🔸9
3
0

33% of participants have transitioned into high-impact careers, including joining Charity Entrepreneurship and roles in AI Safety;

That is amazingly high!

Reply
High Impact Professionals1
0
0

Thanks, @Denkenberger! We've been excited by the results we're seeing and are always pushing for that number to go even higher. That success rate is due to some features of the program, including a network of amazing people who push each other to do more and the program's holistic approach to high-impact careers from high-absorbancy paths to more niche selective opportunities.

Reply
More from High Impact Professionals
47
High Impact Professionals: Enabling Working Professionals to Maximize Their Positive Impact
High Impact Professionals
· · 3m read
2
2
121
Companies with the most EAs and those with the biggest potential for new Workplace Groups
4 authors
· · 4m read
7
7
38
Impact Accelerator Program for EA Professionals
High Impact Professionals
· · 3m read
3
3
View more
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
This work has come out of my Undergraduate dissertation. I haven't shared or discussed these results much before putting this up.  Message me if you'd like the code :) Edit: 16th April. After helpful comments, especially from Geoffrey, I now believe this method only identifies shifts in the happiness scale (not stretches). Have edited to make this clearer. TLDR * Life satisfaction (LS) appears flat over time, despite massive economic growth — the “Easterlin Paradox.” * Some argue that happiness is rising, but we’re reporting it more conservatively — a phenomenon called rescaling. * I test rescaling using long-run German panel data, looking at whether the association between reported happiness and three “get-me-out-of-here” actions (divorce, job resignation, and hospitalisation) changes over time. * If people are getting happier (and rescaling is occuring) the probability of these actions should become less linked to reported LS — but they don’t. * I find little evidence of rescaling. We should probably take self-reported happiness scores at face value. 1. Background: The Happiness Paradox Humans today live longer, richer, and healthier lives in history — yet we seem no seem for it. Self-reported life satisfaction (LS), usually measured on a 0–10 scale, has remained remarkably flatover the last few decades, even in countries like Germany, the UK, China, and India that have experienced huge GDP growth. As Michael Plant has written, the empirical evidence for this is fairly strong. This is the Easterlin Paradox. It is a paradox, because at a point in time, income is strongly linked to happiness, as I've written on the forum before. This should feel uncomfortable for anyone who believes that economic progress should make lives better — including (me) and others in the EA/Progress Studies worlds. Assuming agree on the empirical facts (i.e., self-reported happiness isn't increasing), there are a few potential explanations: * Hedonic adaptation: as life gets
 ·  · 38m read
 · 
In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress: * OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November "the rate of progress continues" to declaring in January "we are now confident we know how to build AGI" * Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Stated in January "I'm more confident than I've ever been that we're close to powerful capabilities... in the next 2-3 years" * Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis: Changed from "as soon as 10 years" in autumn to "probably three to five years away" by January. What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)[1] by 2028? In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years. In particular, while in 2024 progress in LLM chatbots seemed to slow, a new approach started to work: teaching the models to reason using reinforcement learning. In just a year, this let them surpass human PhDs at answering difficult scientific reasoning questions, and achieve expert-level performance on one-hour coding tasks. We don't know how capable AGI will become, but extrapolating the recent rate of progress suggests that, by 2028, we could reach AI models with beyond-human reasoning abilities, expert-level knowledge in every domain, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects, and progress would likely continue from there.  On this set of software engineering & computer use tasks, in 2020 AI was only able to do tasks that would typically take a human expert a couple of seconds. By 2024, that had risen to almost an hour. If the trend continues, by 2028 it'll reach several weeks.  No longer mere chatbots, these 'agent' models might soon satisfy many people's definitions of AGI — roughly, AI systems that match human performance at most knowledge work (see definition in footnote). This means that, while the compa
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
SUMMARY:  ALLFED is launching an emergency appeal on the EA Forum due to a serious funding shortfall. Without new support, ALLFED will be forced to cut half our budget in the coming months, drastically reducing our capacity to help build global food system resilience for catastrophic scenarios like nuclear winter, a severe pandemic, or infrastructure breakdown. ALLFED is seeking $800,000 over the course of 2025 to sustain its team, continue policy-relevant research, and move forward with pilot projects that could save lives in a catastrophe. As funding priorities shift toward AI safety, we believe resilient food solutions remain a highly cost-effective way to protect the future. If you’re able to support or share this appeal, please visit allfed.info/donate. Donate to ALLFED FULL ARTICLE: I (David Denkenberger) am writing alongside two of my team-mates, as ALLFED’s co-founder, to ask for your support. This is the first time in Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disaster’s (ALLFED’s) 8 year existence that we have reached out on the EA Forum with a direct funding appeal outside of Marginal Funding Week/our annual updates. I am doing so because ALLFED’s funding situation is serious, and because so much of ALLFED’s progress to date has been made possible through the support, feedback, and collaboration of the EA community.  Read our funding appeal At ALLFED, we are deeply grateful to all our supporters, including the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has provided the majority of our funding for years. At the end of 2024, we learned we would be receiving far less support than expected due to a shift in SFF’s strategic priorities toward AI safety. Without additional funding, ALLFED will need to shrink. I believe the marginal cost effectiveness for improving the future and saving lives of resilience is competitive with AI Safety, even if timelines are short, because of potential AI-induced catastrophes. That is why we are asking people to donate to this emergency appeal
Recent opportunities in Building effective altruism
5
Introducing EA to United World Colleges? (UWC alum here, curious to explore the overlap)
Unwobblypanda
· · 1m read
1
1
45
The CEA Events Team is Hiring for Three Program Lead Positions
OllieBase
· · 3m read
0
0
49
AIS Netherlands is looking for a Founding Executive Director (EOI form)
7 authors
· · 5m read
4
4
View more