EA Oxford Committee

The EA Oxford committee is a group of people who are excited and serious about effective altruism. The committee is an excellent opportunity to help others work out how they can best make the world better, as well as to develop skills and get experience for your own career. 

And it’s pretty fun too!

Stated responsibilities below are negotiable and will depend on what you’re interested in and excited to run. We are also keen for people to bring their own project ideas or to create their own committee roles. If that’s you, please apply!

Quick role list (expanded below)

  • Student president (minimum 3 hours per week)

  • Cause Area lead (minimum 3 hours per week)

  • Outreach lead (3-5+ hours per week)

  • Peer Mentor (1+ hours per week)

  • Communications lead (2-5 hours per week)

  • Intro Program Facilitator (~3 hours per week)

  • Socials lead (1-5 hours per week)

  • Collaborations lead (2-5 hours per week)

  • Miscellaneous (1-5 hours per week)

    By default, we ask for a one term commitment - so roles and responsibilities won’t change until Hilary at the earliest. And note that for many of these roles, we don’t mind leaving the position unfilled  - we’re mainly keen to have great people on the team.

Role descriptions

Student president (minimum 3 hours per week) — 1 person

We’re looking for someone with strong communication skills and experience with EA ideas and community building

 Responsibilities might include:

  • Being the public face of the society for interactions with e.g. the student press and the SU

  • Being a part of strategy sessions for both this term and Hilary, helping to work out what  EA Oxford’s priorities should be

  • Managing other members of the committee and leading committee meetings 

  • Running other events/programmes that you are excited about

Why might you be interested in this role? You’re thinking about a career in EA community building or Meta work after graduation. You’re excited to be public-facing, and to get involved in EA Oxford strategy discussions 

Cause area leads (minimum 3 hours per week) — 1-5 people

We’re looking for someone with expertise and interest in a particular cause area to run relevant events and programs. We’re particularly interested in cause area leads for common causes (animal welfare, global health, AI, nuclear risk etc.), but we’re also excited about having leads for more niche cause areas too.

Responsibilities might include: 

  • Running a research group on your cause area 

  • 1-1 mentoring of top students interested in that area (connections/resources/guidance etc.)

  • Organising, or facilitating, a reading group

  • Organising collaborative events with relevant societies, or cause-area outreach talks

  • Organising workshops/programs/other events that you’ve come up with

Why might you be interested in this role? We’ll give you funding and general support to run the events and programs you’re most excited about

Communications lead (2-5 hours per week) — 1 or 2 people

Responsibilities might include: 

  • Owning and writing text for our 5000-person mailing list

  • Creating graphics to advertise our events on social media 

  • Updating and improving the website.

  • Other communications projects you’re excited about (e.g. creating explanatory content or marketing materials that other groups could easily use)

Why might you be interested in this role? You’re thinking about a career in communications or writing

Intro to EA Program Facilitator (~3 hours per week) — 1 or 2 people

Responsibilities would include:

  • Facilitating weekly discussions on core EA ideas.

  • Preparing for each session by doing some prior reading

  • Handling miscellaneous issues relating to your group, or notifying organisers of them (typically not much work at all).

Why might you be interested in this role? You want to test how much you’d enjoy doing EA community building and you want to go deeper on your own understanding

Peer mentor (1+ hours per week) — scalable to interest/demand.

We’re looking for someone willing to provide 1-1 support to promising students, either on a particular cause area or to do with cause prioritisation/career planning. This is a flexible position - you can do as little as 1 hour a week, but potentially much more. 

Why might you be interested in this role? You want to get better at coaching or managing people, or just want to spend more time with people interested in the same topics

Socials lead (1-5 hours per week) — 1 or 2 people.

Responsibilities might include:

  • Organising and running big community socials.

  • Running social events for specific sub-groups, e.g. a cause area like animal welfare or biosecurity; or a demographic like women or people of colour. 

  • Running social events aimed at strengthening relationships between students and professionals at Trajan House

  • Any other ideas they might have for improving social connections in the community.


Why might you be interested in this role? You enjoy running social events and want to put your powers to good use! You might also be interested in a career in EA community building

Outreach lead (3-5 + hours per week) — 1 person

We’re looking for someone who’s organised, with a strong understanding of EA ideas, good communication skills, and ideally community building experience, who could take responsibility for driving more impactful outreach.

 Responsibilities might include:

  • Creating a coherent and ambitious outreach strategy, working closely with organisers, cause area leads, the collaborations lead, and the communications.  

  • Overseeing existing outreach work and managing the collaborations and communications leads.

  • Message testing different ways of presenting EA/related ideas.

  • Experimenting with reaching new audiences with e.g. online or in-person events, digital marketing, physical marketing materials, tabling etc.

Why might you be interested in this role? You’re interested in running events generally, or career paths in EA community building/ communications. 

Note that some things for this term are already fairly fixed, but there are lots of opportunities to expand beyond current plans and also alter existing things to make it your own.

Collaborations lead (2-5 hours per week) — 1 or 2 people.

We’re looking for someone who’s organised with strong communication skills and deep EA context. They would manage existing relationships, and actively seek out useful collaborations with both student societies or professional groups. 

Responsibilities might include:

  • Being EA Oxford’s primary point of contact for other student societies and supporting groups that we work with (e.g. Oxford AI safety Hub)

  • Actively consulting other committee members about what groups might be useful for them to be in contact with, then helping make that happen. 

  • Generating your own ideas for collaboration opportunities we could run, and making those happen.

Why might you be interested in this role? You’re interested in running events generally, or EA community building

Miscellaneous

Some things don’t neatly fit into the categories above, and we also suspect that some people will have great ideas that we haven’t thought about. So we’re excited for you to reach out with other ideas in mind.

Some examples:

  • Running rationality workshops / programmes.

  • Organising hackathons on a broad topic like “global priorities” or on a particular cause area

  • Running content related to supporting people with cause prioritisation or career planning

  • Designing surveys to get a more detailed picture of our reputation in Oxford

  • Developing a stronger system of metrics for evaluating our events