The Catalyst Program

A ten-week remote program connecting undergraduate students and mentors to work on projects related to global health, animal welfare, AI safety, and any field with the potential for enormous positive impact. Student applications are due September 14th.

Students Apply Here! Express Interest

Projects this term

Apply here to be a student mentee on one of these projects. Applications are due September 14th, AoE.

Polina Povarova
FarmKind
Examining What Actually Works in Getting People to Act
A review of the research on what actually gets people to take action, focused on how good the evidence really is. Students will produce a list of the findings that hold up, separating well-evidenced techniques from those that were never properly tested or failed to replicate.
Roman Ross
Effective Altruism Purdue
Build better AI safety career pipelines
Mentees will think about strategies for helping people upskill and get jobs in EA or AI safety, working from existing resources such as aistalentpipelines.org. They will then have some flexibility to choose a mini-project that addresses some of these gaps.
Nathan Reed
Independent
Surveying the Literature on LLM Claim Extraction Evaluation
Currently, the literature on how to evaluate the ability of LLMs to extract claims from passages faithfully and comprehensively is scattered. In this project, we'd survey the existing literature on this topic in order to write a blog post with our findings.
Ahmed Wez
MIT AI Alignment / Impact First
Navigating the Intelligence Explosion
Build a research incubator for important and underexplored questions about the transition to AGI, where students propose their own ideas and get the support, mentorship, and resources to develop their most promising ideas further.
Ahmed Wez
MIT AI Alignment / Impact First
The Mentor Bottleneck
Design a mentorship pipeline that helps train the next generation of AI safety mentors.
Ahmed Wez
MIT AI Alignment / Impact First
Can We Still Tell Who Is Ahead in AI?
If one actor has a better AI for coding while another has a better AI for planning, who is more capable? Who is in the lead? And what are the consequences for bargaining, deterrence, and strategic stability?

Connecting students and mentors to create impact

We run a 10 week program where groups of students work with a mentor in one of several high impact cause areas. Mentors can propose and lead projects in AI safety, global health and development, biosecurity, or animal welfare.

Students should apply if they care about having an impact and want to build experience doing useful work. Mentors should apply if they have some experience in their cause area and want to help with developing future talent. We think you can be a great mentor even if you are early in your career, and we encourage you to apply even if you’re a grad student or highly experienced undergraduate.

Our process

  1. 01

    Applications

    The student application will be released on August 26th. Students filling out the application will rank their top three projects and answer project specific questions. Mentors will rank the student applicants to their project, and the two rankings will be used to create groups for each project.

  2. 02

    Kickoff

    Successful applicants will be put into groups with their mentor, an experienced student or professional working in one of our cause areas. The students will meet with their mentor at least once a week, and will work towards a specific goal or deliverable. Along the way, students will improve their problem solving abilities and knowledge of their cause area.

  3. 03

    Wrap up and extension

    If possible, students will publicly publish their deliverable and reflect on their project with their mentor. In some cases, the project could be extended at the discretion of the mentor.

  4. 04

    Onward and upward

    With the completion of their project, students will have gained legible experience and skills. This will help them as they work to obtain other opportunities, and give them a better sense of how they are best suited to make an impact.

Key dates

July 20

Mentor application available

August 14

Mentor application deadline

August 26

Student application released

September 14

Student application deadline

September 28

Projects begin

November 30 – December 7

Final week and wrap up

Our organizers

Brian Foerster

Co-President, EA Purdue

Jeremy Pan

Co-Organizer, EA Berkeley

Madeleine Hoffman

Co-President, UChicago EA

Ian Habich Ramirez

Co-Organizer, EA Berkeley