Intro Fellowship

Sign up for our fellowship

How can we use the world’s resources to best help others? How can we tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems, including ending global poverty and factory farming, mitigating technological risks, preventing future pandemics, and stopping climate change? How can WashU students find fulfilling and impactful careers?

The fellowship is an eight-week long program that engages with these questions and explores the core concepts and ideas within the Effective Altruism community. We hope the fellowship will provide you with a framework for figuring out how you can make a difference in the world.

If you want to learn more before signing up, come to an info session: Monday 1/27 or Wednesday 1/29 at 6:00 pm in DUC 241.

Applications are due by January 31st, 11:59 PM

  • Over the course of Weeks 1 and 2, we aim to introduce you to the core principles of Effective Altruism. This week we’ll investigate what opportunities to do good we have available to us; come to terms with the tradeoffs we face in our altruistic efforts; and explore tools that can help us find unusually high-impact opportunities.

  • In Week 2 we continue to explore the core principles of Effective Altruism. We focus on giving you tools to quantify and evaluate how much good an intervention can achieve; introduce expected value reasoning; and investigate differences in expected cost-effectiveness between interventions.

  • “We are always in triage. I fervently hope that one day we will be able to save everyone. In the meantime, it is irresponsible to pretend that we aren’t making life-and-death decisions with the allocation of our resources. Pretending there is no choice only makes our decisions worse."

    - Holly Elmore

    Whenever we allocate our resources in one way, we are implicitly choosing not to give these resources to a different cause or intervention. This week explores the moral and practical implications of our resulting situation.

  • “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?” 

    – Jeremy Bentham (1789)

    This week focuses on your own values and the practical implications that these views have. During Week 4 we explore who our moral consideration should expand to, with a particular focus on farmed animals as a case example.

  • In Weeks 2 and 3 we discussed attempting to quantify the impact of altruistic interventions. However, most cost-effectiveness analyses can only take into account the short-run effects of the interventions, and struggle to take into account long-run knock-on effects and side effects. This criticism has been made forcefully against early effective altruist attempts to evaluate interventions based on cost-effectiveness. 

    This week we’ll explore a different approach to finding high-impact interventions - focusing on ‘Global Catastrophic Risks’, or GCRs - which attempts to find interventions that beneficially influence the long-run course of humanity.

  • It's really important to think for yourself and reflect on the arguments you've heard in previous weeks: you might uncover places where you disagree, or mistakes in the reasoning. And even if you don't you'll probably understand the ideas more deeply if you've thought about their weakest points.

    So this week, we encourage you to take some time to reflect on your confusion and concerns about the ideas so far and to read up on some of the strongest counterarguments.

  • This week, we will practice making cases for specific cause areas and arguing for why they should be prioritized over other causes. More details for this exercise will be provided in Week 6.

  • In this final section, we hope to help you apply the principles of effective altruism to your own life and career.

    You probably won’t be ready to make a career change just yet - you might want to read and reflect more before you do that. So instead we’ll help you to think through some of your key uncertainties, generate tests for those uncertainties, and plan out how you can make sure you follow through on your intentions.