Advanced Working Groups

Initial chat

Our program begins with a personalised chat with one of the EA Oxford organisers, who will help you identify the topics or skills that you’re most excited to explore.

Working groups

Then we’ll then add you to a Facebook group, populated with people similarly excited to make a difference with their careers. You can use this to start or join a small working group, based on the topics or skills you’re most interested in.

We’ll organise the logistics to get the groups started, but how individual groups are run will depend on what’s best for you. That means the time commitment, and the exact format, may vary a lot between groups. But you’re free (and encouraged!) to join multiple groups, if you can make the commitment.

That’s all a bit abstract, but for example we might expect to run the following kinds of groups, which are based around…

  • Improving some skill, such as writing or forecasting. The forecasting group might meet for an hour and a half once a week to practice forecasting Metaculus questions individually and in pairs

  • Reading and discussing in order to answer a question. For example “Which interventions within animal welfare are most promising?”, where everyone does different reading, meets for 1 hour once per week, and explains and answers questions on what they’ve read. Or “Is Longtermism correct?”, which might meet for 2 hours every 2 weeks, where everyone reads the same piece in the first hour, and then discusses it in the second hour

  • Coworking on an EA priority, like career planning. The group meets for 45 minutes once a week and participants use the 80,000 Hours career guide to start thinking about potential career paths

Is this for me?

Advanced Working Groups are for you if:

  • You’re familiar with the key ideas of effective altruism (e.g. have participated in our Intro Program or have spent roughly 30 hours thinking or reading about effective altruism)

  • You’re excited to spend a few hours every week working on topics or skills that will help you make a big difference in the future

  • You plan to use your career to make the biggest positive difference you can

If any of these things don’t apply to you, the program will be less useful for you, and could be less useful for other participants. If you’re not sure whether this or something else like the Guides program would be best for you, we’re keen to help, so book a chat here!

How do I get involved?

Applications are currently closed for Trinity, but feel free to fill out the form and we’ll be in contact when they open again in Michaelmas.