Effective Thesis is looking to fill two part time roles - project manager and content manager.

EDIT: We're about to complete our hiring process soon, so, unfortunately, we don't accept new applications anymore. If you're interested in keeping in touch with Effective Thesis, I'd recommend signing up for our newsletter.

What is the Effective Thesis project

Effective Thesis is a project that aims to assist students in their final thesis topic choice and direct their attention to areas that have the potential to greatly improve the world. It does this by offering students to engage with profiles of several high impact research directions for each discipline, offering to connect them with researchers working in these directions who can help with the specific topic choice, giving feedback on their existing ideas and research career tips, and inviting them to the online community of other students focusing on similar directions.

Here are the previous reports from 2017 when the project began, 2018 impact report with a description of the project's history and most recent 2019 report outlining my thoughts on future project development.

The hope is that this could be potentially high-leverage as we are focusing on a particularly crucial juncture in people’s trajectories. More generally, within the broader goal of generating new impactful research, this project focuses more on the junior side of research career trajectories, trying to create new junior researchers who are not necessarily dependent on EA funding.

Project manager role

Type of work: Project management - overseeing and taking responsibility for the development of the Effective Thesis project; collaborating on its strategic thinking and being responsible for its execution; being responsible for the continuation of the project and its health (including securing enough funds and talents). You can learn about Effective Thesis and its current strategy here. You would lead the project together with me. I will be focusing more on strategy and you would focus more on execution, but the strategy part would be mostly collaborative.

Time requirements: 20 hours per week. Anyway, given the "owning mindset" needed for the role, there might be longer weeks and shorter weeks - it's good to be flexible to put in a little extra time if needed. The start would be asap. There might be an option to scale up your involvement in the future.

Personality and experiences: 

• having the start-up mindset and experience with developing small teams/organisations
• being responsible, having the “owning” or “take charge” mindset, proactive
• comfortable with independently and creatively tackling various types of tasks
• being good at strategic thinking could be useful
• can step up and do any task that is needed to achieve project goals
• good knowledge of the EA concepts and community

Funding situation: The salary for the 0,5 FTE would be 1450 USD/month (pre-tax) for 6 months, after that conditional on us being able to fundraise enough funds.

If you’d be interested in taking this role or know anyone who might be, please reach out at david.janku@effectivethesis.org. Please also attach a note saying what motivates you to take this role and why you think you would be a good fit for it (including more context about your work situation and future plans).
 

Content manager role:

What does the role consist of: 
The point of this work is to continuously think about what type of content we want more of at a given time and the implementation of it (not necessarily directly by you creating the content, a lot of it is better to outsource to people with more domain knowledge, but you would have the responsibility for the content to be created and to be of high quality). An example is our list of "prioritized research directions", which is probably the most important category of content we have - your task would be to think about what new directions would be good to add, what would be good to rewrite / improve, who could help with that, or do it yourself. Similarly, it would be your responsibility to think about prioritizing content categories, such as prioritized research directions vs list of potential funding sources for students and early researchers vs list of potential supervisors for each direction, etc ...
Thinking about how to present our content on the website (e.g. which study disciplines to cluster our prioritised research direction profiles into, where to place lists of potential supervisors, funding sources, etc...) is also part of the role.

Currently we have one active volunteer working on content who can help with various tasks.

An important aspect is to "take responsibility for content" - my goal for this role is to allow me to stop thinking about our content so much and to know that someone I trust does this well. That means there is going to be no micro-management, quite the opposite. I expect to have once in two weeks/monthly meetings with the content manager to review the changes and plan ahead. The content manager will also be encouraged to share the changes proactively with our coaching team and keep in touch with them. 

Role fit:
I think a good fit for this role is someone who is already well versed in EA ideas and enjoys working with content (for example, regularly reads the EA forum or another EA blog, a big plus if they create content themselves from time to time) and also is interested in how to improve science and processes of knowledge creation.

Time requirements and salary:
I estimate that this work will take about 10 hours a week on average. I'm currently looking to pay $500-800 per month for the role, depending on experience and country of living (which would come to between $12.50 and $20 per hour), but I'm open to paying more for an especially strong candidate, and I'd certainly pay more if the work took more time than I anticipated. I think this is a good opportunity to make a significant contribution to the development of the Effective Thesis project, because the content part is quite an important component of the project.

If you’d be interested in taking this role or know anyone who might be, please reach out at david.janku@effectivethesis.org. Please also attach a note saying what motivates you to take this role and why you think you would be a good fit for it, including e.g. examples of your previous content you've published elsewhere; more context about your work situation and future plans, etc..
 

Volunteer coaching roles

Finally, if you’d like to join our volunteer team of internal coaches/student guides who assist students in the process of their thesis topic choice, connect them with relevant resources and people, and work on improving our coaching process, please also reach out at david.janku@effectivethesis.org.