Why You Should Become a University Group Organizer

By Noah Birnbaum @ 2025-07-29T13:00 (+132)

Confidence Level: I’ve been an organizer at UChicago for over a year now with my co-organizer, Avik. I also started the UChicago Rationality Group, co-organized a 50-person Midwest EA Retreat, and have spoken to many EA organizers from other universities. A lot of this post is based on vibes and conversations with other organizers, so while it's grounded in experience, some parts are more speculative than others. I’ll try to flag the more speculative points when I can (the * indicates points that I’m less certain about). 

I think it’s really important to make sure that EA principles persist in the future. To give one framing for why I believe this: if you think EA is likely to significantly reduce the chances of existential risks, you should think that losing EA is itself a factor significantly contributing to existential risks. 

Therefore, I also think one of the most important ways to have a large impact in university (and in general) is to organize/start a university EA group. 

Impact Through Force Multiplication

1. Scope – It's easy to be scope insensitive with respect to movement building and creating counterfactual EAs, but a few counterfactual EAs potentially means millions of dollars going to either direct work or effective charities. Getting one more cracked EA involved can potentially double your impact!
   1. According to this post from 2021 by the Uni Groups Team: “Assuming a 20% discount rate, a 40 year career, and $2 million of additional value created per year per highly engaged Campus Centre alumnus, ten highly engaged Campus Centre alumni would produce around $80 million of net present value. The actual number is lower, because of counterfactuals.” It should be noted that campus centre alumni is referring to numbers estimated from these schools.
   2. They also included an anecdote of a potential near-best-case scenario that I think is worth paraphrasing: The 2015 Stanford EA group included: Redwood CEO Buck Shlegeris, OpenPhil Program Director Claire Zabel, Full-Time EA Journalist Kelsey Piper, and former CEO of Redwood and Constellation Nate Thomas. However, the Stanford group went dark in 2016 – for years, there was only one active member and few events were run. “As a result, we probably lost a few Bucks, Claires… Kelseys and Nates. That’s a lot of impact missing.”
2. Neglectedness – many groups have shut down or become small recently (from talking to other organizers, much of this is due to brain drain to AIS groups). While the Groups Team at CEA is doing some incredible work, there is much work to be done and a lot of it requires motivated, ambitious, and EA-aligned university students to step up.
   1. *The status incentives for community building in EA are also not as great as they should be. For instance, if you play a counterfactual role in someone becoming a cracked EA, you don't get their status. Given that status is a factor that motivates people to take certain actions/careers, one should think that talent in EA community building is likely under-resourced.
3. Tractability – Starting a club in university is much easier than it used to be. You can likely get CEA group-support funding and the CEA Groups Team has a lot of institutionally passed down knowledge that can be really helpful for best practices.
   1. Succession – A lot of EA groups fail because they don't have successors, and I don't blame them – getting people to take on this responsibility is difficult. However, you can be the successor you want to see in the world; if your group is looking for a successor (cough Stanford cough, cough UMich cough, cough Brown cough), this is a particularly good situation to be an organizer – you’ll have built-in infrastructure, mentors, and be trained for at least some time before you start being a senior organizer. Even if you don’t know whether the current organizer is looking for a successor, or you know that they already have a successor, reach out anyways; having another hand can go a long way. 

Individual Benefits

Personal Impact

1. Avoiding Value Drift – EA is hard to do alone—being the only one on campus thinking seriously about these ideas can feel isolating. This can make people feel demotivated and potentially value drift away from EA. This means that having some/creating an EA community can potentially make everyone's impact greater.
   1. It’s really easy to get hacked by local incentives in university – i.e. caring about things that matter locally but don’t matter in the broader scope of things (for instance, sometimes grades, social status, job status, etc). This can lead to a lot of value drift away from EA, and organizing can help align your local incentives with your reflected global incentives.
   2. It’s pretty easy for EA to be a (big) part of your college experience without putting it into action if you don’t have a group motivating you – the ideas themselves, at least to me, are very cool! Putting skin in the game when you need to be held accountable, etc. will make you more motivated to take future action. (This is not to say that not having a group means that you don’t have skin in the game - it is only to say that organizing a group can help.)
   3. Spending a lot of time with people who care about making the world better means that you’re more likely to think about these ideas, take them seriously, and avoid value drift. While this exists from merely being in the group, there’s more social pressure if you lead it.
2. Cause Prioritization – People will ask you why you are choosing the career you are, and they may even push back. Personally, all of my best cause prioritization thoughts have come from other members in the group (from fellow organizers to intro fellows) pushing back on my arguments and beliefs!
   1. *There’s a potential failure in EA where you initially get into it, learn about a specific cause area, and then kinda stick onto it for longer than you should have without much thought. Organizing lowers this risk—you’re exposed to many cause areas and get more feedback. 

Professional 

1. Relevant Experience – There are very few opportunities in college to lead something with real stakes—this is one of them. As an organizer, you’re essentially in a mid-level executive role: you have mentors who’ve done this before and can guide you, but it’s up to you to execute and innovate. That means taking accountability for mistakes, pivoting when things go wrong, and growing through both failure and success—these skills are pretty rare to develop in college.
   1. Not unique to EA leadership but: 1) testing fit for management, ops, and community building, 2) leadership roles are a good signal for many jobs, 3) you learn about what persuades and drives people.
   2. It's a huge positive signal if you're thinking about jobs at EA orgs. If you led a group, you’re probably familiar with the ideas.
2. Networking – There are a lot of good networking opportunities – from being a spokesperson for EA at your school and talking to other organizers at top schools to potentially getting invited to organizer retreats. 

Social

1. Meeting a lot of cool people – Many of the people I enjoy talking to at UChicago most are in or adjacent to the EA crowd. If you’ve read this far, there’s a good chance you’d find similar people interesting.
2. Making friends in general – In my experience, and from the experience of people I've talked to, seeing the world in a similar way and sharing values is an important aspect of making meaningful and lasting friendships. Having a strong EA community, then, becomes very conducive to finding and making great and lasting connections. 

Counters

1. What about AI?
   1. *News flash: cause prioritization is still not solved and short AI timelines doesn’t mean that AI is the only thing that we can or should work on!
   2. *Here’s an assumption: if you’re this far into this post, you probably think that EA could have been really helpful in the past 300 or so years (i.e. globalization). You might even think that it would have been helpful much before then. If you do believe that, as a general rule, I would find it super surprising if EA principles stopped being really important 15 years after its creation (i.e. right before and after big things started happening with AI).
   3. It’s really important to have AIS people that are aligned with core EA principles. If they’re not, they might end up doing things that are really non-optimal or maybe even counterproductive. Sometimes EA is just a good signal that someone is in AIS for the right reasons (as opposed to the interesting problems, the clout now associated with AI safety, etc). Beware of the vultures!
2. What if I’m not fit for it? What if there’s someone else who is better for the role?
   1. *Maybe. Maybe not. I think more people can do it than one might initially think. If you can't push yourself to talk to people, maybe it's not for you; otherwise, it’s probably at least worth a shot.
   2. If there’s someone likely better than you for the role, you can potentially co-organize or at least give a helping hand.
3. What if I'm a senior?
   1. If you don't have an EA group, starting one and quickly handing it off to an underclassman could still be extremely influential! I know at least 3 seniors starting groups right now that are starting an EA group!
4. The opportunity cost is high for work and social life.
   1. I totally agree – this will be difficult, and you shouldn’t do it if you aren’t willing to give it the time and effort it deserves. Still, it’s worth questioning what exactly you are doing with your other time and if anything that’s less important can be dropped (from recreational activities to other commitments). Like I said, it might have some more social and professional benefits than one might naively think.
5. Some places will have a really hard time creating counterfactual EAs -- say, a small commuter school.
   1. If you're at a place like this, you should think about it quite hard (I do know people who have created successful groups at places like these), but the case is likely weaker. I'd understand if you come to the conclusion that organizing is not the best way to do good in college.
   2. *I think lots of people think that their school has super unique vibes (perhaps they think an EA club wouldn’t do very well) when that vibe is more indicative of their friend group. EA groups could take many shapes and sizes! 

I'm not going to tell you that it's particularly easy (spoiler alert: it's not), but I do feel comfortable telling you that there's a lot of institutional knowledge in running groups and that there are a lot of very competent people to talk to that have gone through the same/similar things. I feel pretty confident saying that if you put the work in and are thoughtful about it, there's a solid chance you can both have a great impact and gain many useful skills! 

If you’re an organizer for a university EA group or were one at some point, drop a comment and share some of your experiences – what do you agree with, disagree with, and what would you add? 

If you want to talk more about why you should be an EA organizer or want advice on how you can start a group, please reach out (my email is dnbirnbaum@uchicago.edu). Even if you don't wanna talk, but this did help you, reach out -- I'm interested in seeing how far this post could go. 

Thank you to Michelle Ma, Avik Garg, Sam Robinson, and Matthew, for helpful comments and suggestions on this post. All mistakes are my own.