Greetings Everyone!
This post aims to receive constructive criticisms, collaborators, and help from anyone with expertise or interest.
Context:
EA Kathmandu University received a huge interest in the “EA Awareness Program,” designed to make people aware of the EA movement, opportunities in the EA field, and different ways s/he can contribute to the movement. Even after the program, those who remain interested will eventually take the EA introductory fellowship and EA in-depth program and become active members of the EA community in Nepal. We have received more than 150 responses from students to attend the program, and to make the program effective decided to run the awareness programs in batches.
Opportunity:
We have thought of evaluating the impact of the awareness program in various ways in a phase-wise design so that everybody interested can attend the program. I am an MITx Micromasters credential holder in Data, Economics, and Development Policy, which has equipped me with all the necessary resources to design and run a randomized evaluation. We want to have three different presentations, one balanced with career prospects and the impact people can have, one with a higher weightage of career prospects, and the final one with a higher weightage of impact people can have with EA. We can analyze a lot of important facets of people like the impact of the awareness program on the thinking of students in various sectors like career, their capabilities, and more. The impact of the awareness program on students opting in for the introductory fellowship, typically which type of presentation leads to better opting into the introductory fellowship, which will help future program designs. We can also follow up with the people for a couple of years to see the differences between those who took the fellowship and who did not. This will also be a better use of funds and we can also track the progress of such programs.
Collaboration:
I want to invite anybody willing to help design presentations and questionnaires, design a proper RCT, review literature, and contribute with anything they can. This process can also be replicated worldwide, and we can start collecting evidence to start an evidence-driven community building in the future, which I think is extremely important.
Regards,
Sabin Subedi
President, EA Kathmandu University
Hey, I think this is likely to be at least a bit underwhelming, because it might be difficult to get enough of a sample size, because it might be hard to capture intuitive movement-building strategies in an RTC, and because lessons might not generalize from Nepal to elsewhere.
But at the same time, I think this is likely to be a really cool project, interesting and very much worth doing, essentially because ~no-one (or no one I've heard of) is doing something similar, and because it might be, all things considered, cheap.
Let me know if you find yourself in need of either high-level mentorship or help applying for funding.