Giving Compass' Take:

• The Effective Thesis project is a product of the Czech EA Association aimed at aligning student research around effective altruism. 

• How can philanthropy best support productive student research? How does purpose fit into student research?

• Learn how one university is attracting students with social justice. 

Effective Thesis is a project that directs students’ research towards EA causes by offering them EA-related topics for their final dissertations and theses. The aim is to deliver three valuable outcomes:

  • Changing student trajectories at a particularly crucial juncture in their lives.
  • Generating additional research in EA cause areas, with little cost to EA funding sources.
  • Making current academics (students’ supervisors and committees) more familiar with EA perspective and EA topics.

Since dissertations are compulsory for many students, they invest much time and effort into them, they have academic support in increasing the quality of their research but often struggle to find a topic, so we had an idea to utilize this process by offering students EA-related topics.

To make it multiplicative, we have decided to ask EA orgs for these topics and agreed they will provide students with consultations to ensure that students’ work will be of best use to EA orgs. Consultations also serve as a motivator for students and should increase the quality of their work and, in a broader sense, should help to align academia and practice.

We have decided to create an online platform to make this project more scalable. We have created a website where people can read about why some problems are more important than others and see the topics filtered by their study discipline and interests. For each topic profile, we have put together descriptions, explaining why the topic is important and including sources to start with when the student is interested in the topic.

Read the full article about the Effective Thesis project by David Janku and Jan Kulveit at Effective Altruism Forum.