Who we are

Effective Thesis is a non-profit organisation that supports university students to begin and progress in research careers that significantly improve the world. We do this primarily by helping students identify important problems where further research could have a big impact and advise them on their research topic selection (mostly in the context of a final thesis/dissertation/capstone project or PhD applications). We run a number of services to achieve this, with topic choice coaching being the most important one.

Our choice of recommended problems and research directions are heavily inspired by the EA community and our funding also comes from sources related to the EA community (most recently from the EA Infrastructure Fund). 

We think what we do is impactful because we focus on a specific intervention point (thesis writing/PhD applications) which often seems to have path-dependent effects on the rest of one's research career trajectory (see more about our mission and theory of change here).

We are a fully remote, small organisation of 6 people working close to full-time and 4 long-term volunteers. We operate mostly in UTC+1 (Central European) timezone, but can potentially accommodate other timezones if the candidate is able to spend some part of their working hours in UTC+1. Our culture is start-up-like, friendly and collaborative. You can expect to have lots of opportunities to grow, learn and try new things, lots of personal agency, and flexibility in how you get things done. We also have regular online socials and optional coworking, to support making connections with other team members.

Here is the most recent 2022 report outlining our activities, impact, and future plans.

Positions we are hiring for

Head of coaching (fulltime) and a coach (part-time)

The Head of Coaching is responsible for improving and carrying out Effective Thesis’s coaching process, including growing and managing our networks of domain experts to generate the most impact and value for students and domain experts alike. Coaching is our most important service, as we think it has the most impact on influencing students’ future research career trajectories. If you would enjoy working with students and domain experts directly across many disciplines and research topics and would enjoy creating impact via helping students figure out which research directions they can have the most impact in and matching them with the right experts, you will likely enjoy this role. Together, we can make sure there are many more highly capable and motivated researchers focusing on the most important global problems in the future, ultimately helping to solve them faster.

Social media specialist (part-time)

We are looking for a freelance Social Media Specialist to manage and create content for our social media accounts. We would like to become a go-to place for aspiring researchers from undergraduate to PhD level who would like to have as much impact as possible with their research careers, and we’re looking for someone who could help us achieve this!  

This role might be an especially good fit for students who are active on Twitter (and other social media platforms) and would like to get better at this skill. You could potentially do this alongside your studies and make use of synergies with your own thesis/research planning.  

Online community manager (part time)

We are looking for a person who will manage and grow our online community of students striving to build their research careers in our prioritised research directions. The goal of the community is to help students create more connections with their peers who are focusing on similar topics and generally help them feel less isolated.

We think this role would fit well with our part-time coaching role and our online research skills workshop creator role, so please let us know if you would be interested in either of those roles as well.

Online Research Workshops Creator (freelance/part-time)

We (Effective Thesis) are looking for a person who will help us develop and run new online workshops aimed at helping aspiring researchers build useful research skills (see e.g. our Reasoning Transparency workshop). We have already identified a number of skills and topics we would like to cover (primarily skills that people are unlikely to learn in academia or elsewhere and that are focused on making research more impactful rather than more efficient). We would like to offer these workshops to aspiring researchers focusing on some of our prioritised research directions, to help them be more successful in building impactful research careers. 

Read more about the thinking we have done about our workshops here.

See here for other ways to get involved with us.

Apply and tell your friends

If you feel like you could be a good fit for any of these roles, please apply via the forms/emails mentioned in the linked job ads! We would also be grateful if you share these ads with your friends and other people who might be a good fit.