Campus specialists: a promising career path | Joan Gass | EA Global: London 2021

okay great welcome everybody and welcome to those who are joining us virtually it's my pleasure to introduce joan today
0:11
uh joan is managing director and head of groups at ceo joan oversees the group's team
0:17
leading ca's work on the growth and onboarding of new community members and providing input on organization wide
0:23
strategy she has an mba from stanford and an mpa in international development
0:29
from harvard's kennedy school of government she previously worked at bain and company where she was a founding
0:34
member of their nigeria office she also co-founded and directed a non-profit in uganda and launched a
0:41
fellowship related to catastrophic risks and emerging technology policy at the harvard kennedy school please welcome me
0:47
in welcoming joan [Applause]
1:04
many companies like mackenzie spend a million dollars per campus per year
1:11
recruiting students this is the norm and elite professional services firms and tech companies the
1:18
goldmans the mckinseys the googles are spending millions of dollars per campus per year
1:24
and this generation of college students cares more about social impact than any generation before
1:31
i think jobs at these firms are not positive for the world most likely but i'm not convinced that it's the best
1:38
thing to do with your career if you want to maximize your social impact
1:44
and meanwhile social impact career services on university campuses
1:49
are often understaffed or unrigorous telling students to do things like
1:55
follow their passions or handing out peace score brochures
2:00
i want to make sure that smart ambitious college students who want to make a meaningful impact on
2:06
the world have the resources and the analytical tools to be able to do so
2:12
and i think that university time is a critical window
2:17
it's often the first time that people think seriously about the priorities in their life and what they want their impact on the
2:24
world to be it's a time when people make friends that might last for lifetimes and
2:29
influence their values over the rest of their time and it's a time when people aren't yet locked in
2:35
haven't chosen a grad school haven't started a career i mean in the united states you don't even have to choose
2:40
your major for the first two years which i know because i changed my major four times in those two years
2:47
it's possible to have values and adopt a worldview that's pretty different later in life but i think it's much harder
2:54
and we're a data-driven community so i think we see this as being true within the effect of altruism community in
3:01
terms of when people hear about effective autism ideas and when they're most receptive
3:07
so this is a graph from the ea survey so looking at folks that are involved in the effective altruism
3:12
community on the bottom axis you have peop the age when people first heard about ea ideas
3:19
and on the left-hand axis you have how engaged people are and you see the spike at the beginning which means if people
3:24
hear about effective altruism ideas around college age they're more likely to be more engaged over the course of
3:30
their career
3:37
the graph supposed to go away this is also true of other data that we
3:44
have so the open phil long termest meta team ran a survey of 200 folks that had a
3:50
long term as careers they were particularly excited about last year and those people reported that they first heard about ea or ea aligned ideas
3:57
when they were 20 and they also reported that it would have been optimal for people to hear about it earlier
4:03
so university time is a really critical time to expose folks to ideas related to
4:08
effective altruism and i think that given this really big
4:14
gap we have in social impact career advice we're a community that could help revolutionize that space
4:20
we have some really powerful ideas like the idea that if you focus on a
4:25
particular intervention or a particular cause area you could have 10 or 100 times the amount of impact as with your
4:33
donations or the idea that you could have the equivalent impact of having
4:38
convincing 10 or 100 of your friends to have social impact careers i also think we have some of the best
4:45
resources that are available on thoughtfully planning your career and at this conference you've heard we
4:51
have some financial resources and we have a lot of problems that we need smart ambitious people to solve
4:57
but what i think we really need is talent on university campuses in order to spread these ideas to more
5:04
people so i want to paint a three-year vision that i think we might be on track to hit
5:10
as a community so by 2024
5:15
for the top 200 universities around the world so these are you know strong
5:20
universities in the us and europe but also i'm talking about the iits of india and the university of sao paulo in
5:27
brazil i want the majority of students to be able to hear about effective altruism
5:34
and for people who are curious to encounter a nuanced version so this might look like something
5:41
like if you go to a student activities fair you get to hear one of the boost that sticks out in
5:48
your mind is the effect of altruism student group or there's a catchy flyer
5:53
that you see in your dorm room that tells you about an eight-week reading group for a student-led course related
5:59
to how to do the most good with your career which introduces you to rigorous frameworks thought-provoking questions
6:06
and shapes how you approach university for the next four years
6:11
this past semester we had 45 groups that were at this level that i just specified
6:17
last year we had 15. i think it's definitely possible that we could get to 200 in the next three years
6:24
and in some places i'm really excited about us going even deeper so by 2024 i think we could have a dozen effective
6:30
altruism campus centers with two full-time staff and physical office space and universities
6:38
these campus centers would provide some of the best most thoughtful social impact career advice
6:44
staff at these centers would help students learn and connect helping them have specific
6:51
career-focused programs and plans helping them dive into cause specific fellowships and being nodal to connect
6:58
them to other professionals and come to regional and global conferences like this one i also think they would help students
7:05
navigate new internships and career opportunities and funding opportunities
7:10
such that they have really strong plans that they've pressure tested over the summers when they graduate from
7:15
university we'll obviously continue to pivot and learn along the way but we already have
7:22
programs like this that i just described running at cambridge and oxford
7:28
and stanford i think it's certainly possible that we could have nine more in the next three years
7:35
but i think that's just what we're on track to do what's really exciting is with ambitious
7:40
entrepreneurs we could do so much more i think it's very plausible that someone
7:46
in this room could help us continue to write the book on how to do field building at
7:52
university so if we're in the process of writing a book i feel like we're in the first chapter and we have a pretty good
7:58
first chapter but we need people to help us rewrite it and help us write the next
8:04
couple chapters so for example maybe an entrepreneur in this room would think about instead of
8:10
having a hiking pre-orientation program as a pre-orientation program at universities what would it look like to
8:16
have a really great social impact career advice free orientation program and that becomes so popular at their university
8:23
that other universities start copying it or what would it look like to help us figure out how we get ea aligned course
8:30
content into popular first year courses or maybe there would be campus centers
8:36
that would run a fellowship with nominations as competitive as fulbrights or rhodes
8:42
and maybe most of the fulbrights and rhodes scholars would be open and excited about effective altruism ideas
8:48
on campuses maybe the goldman sachs recruiters would view the campus center leaders
8:54
as a little bit of a threat and maybe the career staff providing career services would
9:01
start copying the programs that the ea campus centers are running because they're so good and so in demand
9:08
what i think is most exciting about this vision especially for people in this room is the question of who is most
9:15
uh well positioned to execute on it and i think that's current university
9:21
students and recent alumni and i think this is a pretty exciting concept because in most careers and
9:28
general and in ea cause areas you have your pinnacle impact your peak impact at the end of your career when you're in
9:34
your 50s or 60s but ea outreach on university campuses
9:40
is one of the only times you're an expert at your university when you're in your early 20s
9:46
it's a uniquely outsized impact for your age and why is that
9:51
i mean you know your users you know how to share ea ideas with other students
9:56
you know what pizza brings people to meetings you know about the campus you know when students are busy and really really busy
10:04
you know which professors are great to work with and what new initiatives are being run
10:11
that's why we have students who are working part-time while they're full-time students on running their ea groups and
10:18
students taking gap semesters and gap years and working full-time after they graduate
10:24
and one thing i'm excited about is that we've recently seen if a university has a really strong student group
10:30
we can bring in alumni from a different university to help run campus centers
10:35
full-time if you're a university student
10:41
i think there's a chance that the next one to two years could be
10:46
the highest impact that you have even if you go on to other
10:51
specializations afterwards it's not guaranteed
10:56
but it's certainly plausible and i think that basically comes down to multiplier effects the idea that you could counter
11:03
factually get someone involved in effective altruism um who wouldn't otherwise be or wouldn't otherwise take
11:09
the ideas as seriously and i find it really um powerful to think
11:14
about multiplayer effects by thinking through specific examples so i think back to the group that
11:20
i was a part of um when i was in grad school and i think through what people are doing now and
11:26
one person in that group went on to work with charity entrepreneurship um helping start a charity that sent sms reminders
11:32
out to mothers in india to vaccinate their children and now as a data scientist at the world bank
11:38
another group member helped create partnerships with fast food companies to introduce plant-based meat options in
11:45
fast food restaurants across the us another group member changed their
11:50
thesis early to write about pandemics before covet came out then was involved in the global coveted response and
11:57
helped influence 10 billion dollars of funding related to camp pandemic preparedness
12:02
one of my favorite stories is about a friend who was in this really unique window of trying to decide what their phd was
12:09
going to be on and got introduced to a series of very
12:14
influential people in the process when they were deciding this topic and ended up switching their
12:19
phd focus to focus on a specific emerging technology and it was really important
12:24
they had the conversations that the group introduced them to at this time because they were about to choose an advisor and they were about to choose a
12:29
topic and be locked in and they knocked their phd out of the park and two weeks ago they started at
12:35
the white house so i think there's a lot of impact that
12:40
can be had by being someone that's doing field building work
12:45
and other people in the meta space who are experts would take this even farther not just that it's impactful but that it
12:51
could be one of the most if not the most important decades for field building and
12:56
metalwork that's because if you think we're going to be bigger soon then opportunities for movement building
13:02
will be less good in the future than they are now there's more low-hanging fruit and if you think we're at a hingy moment
13:08
related to transformative technology then doing things earlier matters more
13:20
so um some of you guys know who buck is he's a fund manager on the ea infrastructure fund and the cto of
13:27
redwood research an ai safety organization and he wrote up a memo at a recent group
13:32
leaders retreat that said the caveats are if you're able to do student group
13:37
organizing if you don't massively hate that work if you're at a suitable school and your school doesn't already have two
13:43
full-time equivalent people working there then he thinks there's more of a 50 chance that an optimal allocation of
13:50
someone's time over the course of their undergraduate degree involves you spending at least one
13:55
full-time year on student organizing and he goes on to talk about how he
14:02
thinks it's quite rare for someone who's university aged to make a contribution to ea that impresses
14:08
him as much as people who run good student groups
14:14
so we've talked about this opportunity on the table we've talked about the university critical window and why
14:21
students and recent alumni are well positioned to try and capture it and how much impact is on the table
14:27
i just want to spend a little bit of time talking about what cea is going to do and has been doing in order to
14:33
support people that are in this position the first thing is that we have
14:39
foundational support for individuals that are running student groups this
14:44
semester we've launched a program so that two university group leaders with a total of 10 hours a week can efficiently
14:51
start a university group we want to make sure they aren't having to figure things out from scratch
14:57
so these individuals receive stipends that free up time from their mundane campus jobs
15:03
and get training on how to do intro to ea presentations and activities for
15:08
outreach have a package of outreach materials related to funding for food and books and flyers and posters
15:16
and then have syllabus for student-led courses with thought-provoking questions and exercises and training for student
15:22
facilitators we're also really excited about the peer cohorts that are created through this so people aren't just starting this alone
15:29
in their university but other peers around them are starting so they can problem solve and learn from each other
15:35
and also an ea hub website with resources that can be helpful to share
15:40
what other things and activities have worked across different college campuses
15:46
the other thing that we have recently done is piloted our campus specialist program
15:51
so with a subset of focused universities we want to make sure to elevate people
15:57
working full-time post graduation on ea field building in their university
16:03
we spent the summer designing this program so we had some student leaders working out of our office in oxford we
16:08
got a bunch of great feedback from them um and we had some really exceptional
16:13
student leaders who i think have been like pioneers in this space so james ung and emily emma abele and the student
16:20
careers team really motivated a bunch of our thinking and we've grown our internal cea team
16:26
three times 3x the number of times in order to support this program and so what it looks like in us for us
16:32
to be able to support people who are working full time after they graduate from university
16:37
is before we used to have a one-year grants program where you got some money and you got to kind of like go out on
16:44
your own and do some work at your university now we're offering two-year employee
16:49
status con employee employment status at cea so you have a guaranteed job for two years it
16:55
comes with job security pension private health insurance funding for top-end laptops and a work set up we really just
17:01
want to enable these entrepreneurs in order to build campus centers at their university
17:06
and we really value their time which is why the salaries that we offer are competitive with the average oxbridge
17:13
and ivy league undergrads who are graduating and getting their first job and this is average across all fields
17:20
not just the non-profit sector we're investing in people's personal development so entrepreneurs that are
17:26
full-time and part of this program will have an advisor and a mentor in order to
17:32
bounce ideas off of a 2 000 pound professional development stipend and access to things like management courses
17:38
that are often used by fortune 500 companies to train their employees
17:44
folks in this program will have an opportunity to give input on cea group strategy q a with me and max and access
17:51
to early strategy documents we want deeper integration into professional networks in ea so flights
17:57
to come to that are paid to come to ea global and regional conferences um a prepaid expense card so people can
18:04
easily access support they need for themselves in their group and retreats with meta organizations
18:10
like open philanthropy and 80 000 hours and then the last change that we're making that i'm really excited about is
18:16
giving people 30 time to do what they think is most impactful so they might want to explore how to
18:23
start an effective altruism high school outreach program or building up a cause specific fellowship they might want to
18:28
do research on their own in order to think about phd programs they want to apply for and invest in their own career
18:35
so we want to build in a lot of flexibility for people because we are excited about the campus centers
18:40
folks are building but we're also excited about individuals and their career trajectory
18:45
across the rest of their lifetime and we this is the program i just described is for folks that are working
18:51
full time on ea university field building of campus centers but we have a similar version of this in pilot focused
18:57
universities for people that are still in school and working working part-time testing out
19:03
their fit for this area we're obviously going to keep iterating based on user feedback and would love to
19:09
hear from all of you about this but one thing that i think is really important is to change the profile of what
19:15
effective altruism field building looks like on university i think it's historically been a bit low
19:21
status within the ea community and hard to explain external to the effect of altruism community
19:27
and i think that's changing and we should continue changing that more
19:33
so to wrap to wrap up the last two things that i want to touch on are
19:39
um the biggest misconceptions that i think have kind of like led to this mislabeling of field building within
19:46
university one misconception i think is that
19:51
doing campus organizing isn't good for career capital and when i step back and think about the
19:58
campus centers that we're trying to build if someone's successful they could be having a million dollar budget
20:05
managing a multi-person team creating partnerships at their university and starting new research
20:11
initiatives that's a pretty powerful opportunity for someone out of undergrad and pretty
20:17
unparalleled and i think it's also really cool and fun to explain over thanksgiving dinner like you can say i'm
20:23
running a campus center that helps students navigate social impact careers i think this is great career capital if
20:30
you're thinking about entering meta work the center for effective altruism groups team hires people who have done great
20:37
job running groups in order to help coach other folks but we've also had alumni go on to work at 80 000 hours or
20:44
meta-organize other meta organizations but i don't think it's just great career capital if you want to
20:51
do meta work i think it's great career capital for a bunch of other career paths
20:56
so as part of doing this your role is to get really involved in the effect of altruism community and build your own
21:03
personal network so that you can support other students to do so that's why one of the reasons why 80 000
21:10
hours advising is making sure that anyone that's on our pilot program has access to career coaching this year
21:17
and one thing that is uh i think sometimes a bit uh
21:23
complicated to to like think through is that having a really deep understanding of effective altruism ideas helps open
21:30
up a bunch of different additional career opportunities and i think that's because we're in a really early stage
21:36
building effective altruism which means organizations that are hiring aren't in the scaling position they're like trying
21:42
to develop a product or trying to communicate a complicated idea or trying to figure out product market fit and
21:47
that means they need to hire people that have a really good understanding of the ideas so that those people can go off
21:53
and test out different paths to value and make a bunch of individual decisions on their own and that's why i think i
21:59
often get requests not just from meta organizations but a bunch of direct work organizations asking me for
22:05
recommendations about group leaders that people should consider interviewing and hiring because they want people who have
22:10
a really strong understanding of the basic concepts so
22:16
i think then the paths that are open aren't just in meta work but in entrepreneurship and organizational
22:22
field building and direct work as well i can think of a group leader in the entrepreneurship space who's considering
22:28
a multi-million dollar ea back startup right now i know folks that are helping to run the internal operations of
22:35
forethought and will mccaskill's new book that's coming out and who are
22:40
really doing great work with long term as policy advisory organizations helping
22:46
like start up really really notable think tanks and i know people doing cost specific
22:51
work that are group organizers or university field builders are now our top ai safety
22:56
researchers or use that as a platform to then go on to graduate school
23:02
the last thing that i would mention is if you're not sure about your cause area or your cause prioritization then doing
23:10
field building might be a really great way for you to have time and space to think about that so i'm probably a bit biased because i
23:17
spent seven years working on a particular cause area including a graduate school specific
23:24
program that was linked to that cause area and it was only in graduate school where i had time and space to step back
23:29
and think through my cause prioritization and ended up thinking that i should plausibly pivot and focus on a different area and i really wish i
23:36
had two years earlier in my career to spend time thinking about that because that would have influenced my trajectory
23:41
pretty significantly so i think that ea field building can be really really good for career capital
23:49
i also think it can be really good for skill development and that's the second myth that i want us to destroy which is
23:55
that field building in university or running an ea group isn't good for skill development
24:01
and you know i think it can be great for i mean i just think about the skills that folks in campus centers and leading
24:06
ea groups need and it's people management and it's recruitment and it's project management and it's running an
24:13
organization and it's operation it's communicating ea ideas and keeping up to speed with the cutting edge ones
24:19
but um i find this even more compelling when i just like look at what current campus leaders and campus specialists
24:26
are doing so um on the far left hand side is koki
24:32
koki is helping to run a student
24:38
a student course related to introducing effective altruism ideas to over 40 people
24:44
with really diverse backgrounds around the world and doing cutting ed edge localized cause prioritization research
24:51
related to the most effective donations within the uae that's a pretty cool opportunity for a
24:57
university student kuhan helped start the stanford
25:03
existential risk initiative and the stanford existential risk summer fellowship
25:08
this allowed students to explore summer fellowship and summer research opportunities
25:13
related to existential risk it was so popular on campus that hundreds of students applied for a
25:19
couple dozen spots which made it more competitive to get into than stanford itself
25:26
and finally there's dewey so um dewey ran a successful student group at durham
25:32
graduated um did some things and then applied to work
25:37
as a full-time university field builder at cambridge so a really cool example of someone who ran a really strong group
25:43
and now is running a campus center somewhere else um dewey now has a team of six people
25:48
that are working with him um and is creating models for what it can look like for people to do fifty
25:55
percent their own cause specific research in fifty percent cause specific field building
26:00
including running an ai safety fellowship which is one of the best learning opportunities for university
26:06
students in the field so i think it is not true that group
26:11
organizing or running campus centers is bad for skill development and it's really cool just to look at what some of the folks that are
26:17
currently doing are able to to work on okay it wouldn't be an ea speech so i
26:23
didn't tell you why you shouldn't consider doing this so i'm going to tell you reasons why you might not want to consider field
26:29
building right before i wrap up if you think about the impact model the
26:35
impact model looks something like you might want to think about how good you
26:40
are at creating multiplier effects and then you might want to think about the opportunity cost if any from doing
26:47
direct work so you should consider running an ea group or running a campus
26:53
center less if you think you're not going to be as good at creating multiplier effects so maybe this means you don't have a
27:00
track record of getting folks excited about ea ideas or maybe you might be crowding out someone who could do a
27:05
better job if you're at a really small university or you think your university is already
27:11
at the point of saturation in terms of other people promoting ea ideas you might want to consider this less
27:19
in terms of direct work if you think the opportunity cost of doing organizing as
27:24
opposed to making progress on your own direct work doesn't make sense the benefits don't outweigh the cost then
27:29
you might also want to consider not doing this so maybe you have an opportunity you can't delay maybe you have like a
27:35
co-founder and a bunch of funding and you think this is a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity and if you delayed it
27:41
something like that wouldn't come along in the future it might be a reason why the opportunity cost of your direct work isn't worth it um maybe you think the
27:49
benefit of recruiting people isn't worth what you could do during direct work for two years so if you have
27:56
super short ai timelines for example and you're doing ai safety work this might be an example
28:03
i realize a key thing i highlighted in all this is like how good are you at multiplier effects and that's kind of
28:08
hard to figure out so that's why we have tried to develop a bunch of opportunities for people to
28:15
test their fit early if people are interested in this area or interested in exploring more about
28:21
whether or not they should do this some standard advice i give to people is first thing is have a really solid
28:27
understanding of ea ideas i think if you're trying to communicate effective altruism to other people it's really
28:34
important to do that in a high fidelity way so i encourage people to read a lot join ea virtual programs be a
28:42
facilitator join your local group really invest in yourself and develop those ideas
28:48
and then test your fit test what it's like to do this part time and you know many tests of this might be
28:55
applying to run a student group at your university and so we have folks on our team like jessica and catherine that are
29:01
really happy to help people get university groups off the ground if there isn't one already at your university
29:07
or if you're in one of our pilot focused universities you can talk to our campus specialist team about the additional
29:12
programs that we have as well and if that's really successful then regardless of where you are you could be
29:18
a really strong candidate for running one of our campus centers
29:25
the whole um the whole thing that we're trying to do here is just give you more information and work with you and give
29:30
you more data about your comparative advantage and your fit which is going to be localized to your university we're
29:36
going to need to do on a case-by-case basis so i just want to wrap up by thinking
29:42
about um stanford in 2015.
29:47
and stanford in 2015 had a really awesome effective altruism student group the type of folks that came out of that
29:53
were buck who i mentioned earlier who's the cto of redwood research and kelsey piper who now writes at
30:00
future perfect in vox and does really incredible work and claire who leads the long term as
30:06
meta team at the open philanthropy project and i'm so excited about the current
30:11
stanford team but before that the group but before in between the 2015 team and
30:20
the current group that i'm really excited about stanford went dark we didn't have a student group there for
30:25
several years and it makes me really sad to think about the bucks
30:30
and the kelseys and the claires that we missed out on in that time
30:36
and so we need you to help us make sure that future campuses don't go dark
30:42
and we need exciting entrepreneurs to make sure that the messages of goldman
30:48
m google and mckinsey aren't the only recruiting messages that students here on college campuses
30:55
thank you guys so much [Applause] [Music]

Queue

3 / 13

SAVE

CLEAR

1:00:00
NOW PLAYING

Careers strategies and building aptitudes |