This week has three aims: wrapping up, evaluating the program, and encouraging participants to apply effective altruism to their own life. Make sure you have an overview of the relevant options for staying involved, e.g., groups, mailing lists, programs or events to advertise.
Key Points
This week’s content is intended to help participants begin to think through how they can apply the principles of effective altruism to their own lives and career. The idea is not to convince people to make a career change - instead, the goal is to point to ways to help them think through some of their key uncertainties, generate tests for those uncertainties, and plan out how they can make sure they follow through on their intentions. Participants will hopefully feel motivated to think through practically how they can do lots of good with their lives and are determined to figure out the right next steps for themselves.
Tips for this Session
- Talk through the value of thinking and reflecting carefully - both alone and with support from others - in order for participants to come to the best decisions possible for themselves on how to use their resources to do good.
- Highlight that the idea is not to have a clear view yet, but figuring out how to take action on principles you care about is crucial.
- Emphasise that personal fit considerations could have a major impact on what career path someone chooses, and that this should be factored in as well as cause prioritisation.
During the Session
Exit Survey
First of all, get the participants to complete the exit survey. They should have been sent an email with this link attached! This dramatically increases the number of people who complete the survey and provides valuable feedback, which is really important.
Discussion questions
Discuss the exercise
- Ask people to share their answers about the most pressing global problems as well as their key uncertainties
- Ask people to share their plans for exploring their uncertainties and testing their aptitudes for different kinds of work
Discuss how to get involved
Go over different ways for participants to stay involved with EA.
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❗ Point participants towards the last page of the EA Handbook (More to explore on 'Putting it into Practice') for a comprehensive list of opportunities to get involved. A list of resources about EA can be found here and a list of local EA groups can be found here.
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- Did anyone decide they want to act on any of the suggestions about career advice, cause areas, and donations and do they want to share this?
- What’s the best way to have an impact as a student?
- Being a student is a good time to reflect on your values and think about the direction of your life, as well as to network and find other like-minded people
- Learning about the world
- Deciding which problems you think are most pressing - which problem to work on is a huge and important question.
- Build skills, explore different career routes, and find ways to improve your CV
- Network with others (again, the EA community can be a great friend here)
- Networking can feel ‘icky’ - instead think about it as finding others who you find interesting and get along with
- Put in time to think and plan your career, while you have more space to think.
- If this fellowship is happening as part of a local group, discuss what your local group has to offer. Flag specific ways, places, and times that participants can get more deeply connected to the group.