EA - What Has the CEA Uni Groups Team Been Up To? - Our Summer 2023 Review by Joris P

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What Has the CEA Uni Groups Team Been Up To? - Our Summer 2023 Review, published by Joris P on September 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TLDRCEA's University Groups Team worked on a wide range of projects this summerWe wrapped up a round of UGAP and OSP (our programs supporting university group organizers with digital resources, mentorship, training, and for UGAP a stipend) and launched a new one. Both rounds had over 100 people participating across both programsWe ran a summit for relatively experienced group organizers, had four interns join us (who worked on projects like updating the Groups Resource Centre and setting up residencies), and continued to give out (relatively small) group support grants, to cover operational costs for university groupsWe're excited about potential future projects, like supporting more 'top' universities and/or seeding more support for AIS groups, but continue to reflect on what projects would be most valuableIntroCEA's University Groups Team is working on supporting university groups focused on EA ideas, and their organizers. We wrote more about our mission and vision last year here - note it is slightly outdated. Our team currently consists of Jessica McCurdy (team lead), Jake McKinnon, and Joris Pijpers.In this post we share what we've been working on this summer, including launching new rounds of UGAP & OSP, a summit, an internship program, and more. We won't touch much upon what we did in spring '23 (but have a retrospective of UGAP fall '22 here), and have also chosen to not expand in detail on why we are focusing on these programs and not others, in favor of getting the post out sooner. Additionally, we are still in the process of deeper impact analysis. We hope to publish more details on these in the future.Overall, we are pretty happy with what we were able to achieve this summer and are excited about future directions.Why university groups?We think university groups have the potential to be especially promising places to introduce people to EA ideas, and then help them learn more about and act on them:University group members (and organizers in particular) have a strong track record of making significant contributions to EA priorities, both in and beyond meta workStudents are usually in the process of thinking through their priorities for their careers and lives. In this process, they are often open to exploring new ideas and communities, and have time to do soUniversities are places where people build communities and social networks. These in-person social ties are important for people being more likely to take significant action on EA ideasUniversities can have high concentrations of pre-screened talentUniversities are a very large source of new EAs each year, which means that student groups might have an outsized influence on the development of EA culture and movement priorities. Setting norms of good epistemics through advice and content aspirationally may improve that of EAA note on which universities we focus onWe think top universities, such as those previously listed as focus universities, have a high concentration of top talent. That means that we extend higher touch support to top universities and have some programming focused on them specifically (like our summit and residencies). However, the majority of talented, altruistic and greatly influential people do not come from top universities. Therefore we think scalable support (like UGAP & OSP) which includes both top and non-top universities is also worthwhile. We have many examples of people who are doing work that we think is really important, who did not come from top universities, and might have not gotten involved with EA ideas if it wasn't for their university group. We also think people that we help from these universities tend to...