Research Consortium
This coming spring, we are excited to offer an opportunity to get involved with research relevant to the aims of Effective Altruism. EA at UCLA will be making grants available for students who conduct and complete a research project investigating some topic or concern in EA in greater detail. As part of joining our spring research consortium, you’ll be matched with a mentor who will help both in conducting your research and ensuring that you stay on schedule. In order to be eligible for the grant, which is at default set at $500, you will need to produce a satisfactory work product, be that in the form of a paper, forum post, or some other appropriate medium. We expect that each project will take 5 – 8 hours a week and conclude by the end of the spring quarter – though some flexibility may be possible for both.
The application will close on March 29th, with the expectation that projects will begin on April 3rd.
As part of the application, you will be expected to provide a short abstract for your project. If you would like assistance in creating an abstract, or feedback on your application, please feel free to reach out at effectivebruins@gmail.com.
Please note that we have limited money and space in this consortium and expect to have qualified applications which we are unable to accommodate – as such, we encourage those who are unable to join us this coming spring to reapply in subsequent quarters.
As a general matter, any cause area explicitly discussed in one of our fellowships, or material related to said cause areas, is fair game for conducting research in. If you are unsure whether your proposed project is sufficiently related so as to be considered for our spring research consortium, we are happy to provide feedback at the above email.
A successful research project might take the form of an investigation, where you start with a topic or concern about something in effective altruism and then conduct a curated literature review where you survey the available evidence or arguments in order to reach a conclusion. A more ambitious kind of project would be one in which you create original materials, perhaps by offering a novel solution to a given problem, or reinterpreting an existing data set. As follows, we have provided a few example theses to demonstrate the scale and nature of the sorts of projects we are most interested in:
- Is deworming really effective?
- Why should we focus on existential risks, if at all?
- Is development preferable to aid?
- How should we aggregate welfare?
Note that these theses are quite broad and likely need to be narrowed down some. Also note that while they can be examined through the lenses of a number of disciplines, the sorts of projects we are interested in are ones which do not require laboratory equipment to conduct because we don’t have access to such equipment. We in principle are open to working with those who otherwise do have access to their own equipment. If you wish to work on a project under the supervision of a professor, we are also open to such an arrangement, so long as either Brandon or Josh remains in the loop over the course of your project. Notably, no projects already conducted will be considered retroactively for the grant.
For lingering questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out – either via our listed email or our organization’s official Discord Server.