Finance, consulting, and tech firms spend millions of dollars every year luring ambitious college students toward a Faustian bargain: spend the 80,000 hours of your career working an amoral or immoral job that exists primarily to perpetuate the inordinate wealth and power of the 0.1%, and in exchange, you will receive your own small slice of elite prestige and material luxury. Because this professional path is so well-traveled, and because campus recruiting is so established and well-funded, many Swarthmore students don’t think twice before affixing their own golden handcuffs.
Swarthmore Effective Altruism provides an alternative. We are setting out to create a diverse and robust community of students who want to use their careers to have as large a positive impact on the world as possible: reducing needless misery from global infectious disease, stamping out historical injustice caused by oppression, neglect, and disenfranchisement, and ensuring that emerging technologies like AI and bio-engineering benefit the long-run future of humanity. During our time as undergraduates, we want to think as rigorously as possible about how we can use our lives to promote the common good and act on those insights.
The Swarthmore Effective Altruism Seminar is our flagship program: an 8-week reading and discussion group to consider the world’s most pressing problems and how we can use our careers to solve them. By the end of the program, participants have access to in-depth coaching and speaker events to help others as part of a meaningful life. Students will also gain valuable connections to people in the effective altruism community who are at the vanguard of some of the most innovative ways of improving the world.
The Introductory Seminar is meant to acquaint participants with crucial facts, methods, and topics that they will continue to explore as part of further engagement with both the Swarthmore EA and broader EA communities, be that through our career planning intensives, in-depth programs, or individualized learning and conversation. After completing the program, we hope that participants will feel that they are a part of our community of students seeking, as much as possible, to remedy the ills of the world.
To learn more about the principles and practices of effective altruism, head over to our What is Effective Altruism? page.
Book a time to talk with one of us on the team about the program, or send us a message. We’d love to hear from you and answer any questions you might have!
Applications are open until Wednesday, September 20 at 11:50 pm, though we encourage you to apply as soon as possible. We're aiming for this application to take around 30 minutes, and hopefully no more than 45 minutes. Apply here.
We are committed to building a diverse cohort of up to 15 participants (due to capacity constraints). All are welcome: we do not want the application process to dissuade any potential candidates, and we strongly encourage interested students to apply regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, ability, concentration, and background. We evaluate applications blind to everything in this form (including your name) except for the essay questions. However, in some cases, we will break ties on marginal applications by class year, diversity, or demonstrated interest.
We look forward to learning with you!