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: A Report on running 1-1s with EA Virtual Programs' Participants, published by Elika on January 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TL;DR:

We trialed two rounds of 1-1s and, in total, connected 44 EA VP introductory participants with members of the EA community, focusing on mid-career professionals and early-career professionals/students interested in making career decisions related to EA. We’re still a bit uncertain, but generally feel positive about the cost-effectiveness and value of organising 1-1s with VP introductory participants . Our results suggest that 1-1s are providing a decent amount of value and are generally highly enjoyed by participants. We’re unsure on the longer term effects of 1-1s on engagement in EA.

More specifically, here’s our initial research questions and the answers we found:

Q: How valuable are 1-1s with EA community members for Intro participants or is there any demand for 1-1s?

A: There is strong demand for 1-1s and it seems like 1-1s are valuable for VP participants. We asked "how would people feel if they weren't able to do 1-1s", 21% said they would be very disappointed, which is 19% short from the 40% benchmark. Although it's short of the 40% benchmark, on average 1-1s are rated 8.2/10. This makes us feel a little more confident that some 1-1s can be valuable. We anecdotally think they are valuable because it helps expand their network and exposes them to more of the community.

Q: How cost-effective or impactful are 1-1s in the context of EA VP?

A: We feel somewhat uncertain about the cost-effectiveness of 1-1s, but we think that 1-1s with VP participants are ~3x as cost efficient as an EAG in leading to connections, but only 1/20 as scalable. Some notes on impact: 1-1s are very hits-based, impact can take a long time and it’s hard to measure counterfactual impact.

Q: What types of 1-1s are most valuable (ex. career focused ones, general EA ones, social, etc)?

A: We think that both career-focused and general networking 1-1s are valuable. Career ones for helping people be open to changes, meet others and get advice. General 1-1s to expand people’s network and to serve as practice for reaching out to community members.

Q: What type of mentors doing the 1-1s are best suited?

A: We found a broad range of ‘mentors’ to do 1-1s – mentors who are very knowledgeable about EA and sociable (such as community builders) rate highly. Cause-area specific mentors (e.g. an experienced grant-maker for someone working in philanthropy, an AI safety researcher for someone working as a software engineer) to talk about specific career paths are extremely valuable as well.

Q: What ‘type’ of participant are these most valuable for? E.g. mid-career professionals, those open to changing careers / jobs, students, people near to EA hubs, etc.

A: We’re very excited about mid-career professionals who are interested in changing careers and jobs. We also think social 1-1’s are valuable for anyone highly interested in EA to help them expand their network. A future research direction is to expand the number of VP participants who are offered a 1-1 – primarily test participants whose VP application we were less excited about.

Q: At what stage of the fellowship is it most valuable (beginning, middle, end, after, etc)?

A: We don’t think 1-1s at the beginning of the fellowship is best. We’re generally uncertain on whether there’s a difference between middle, end, and after. It’s either pretty equal or we need to do more tests.

Q: Are repeated 1-1s, maybe some form of mentorship, more valuable than one-off 1-1s?

A: We didn’t manage to test repeated 1-1s or mentorship. That’s a potential future research direction.

We have a few main future goals and paths.

Find ways to streamline the 1-1 process on CEA’s side to make it easier to scale to all of VP

Run some more speci...