Last updated: 4th October, 2023
1. Overview
Introductory fellowships typically have a curriculum with weekly readings (and sometimes exercises) that is distributed to participants. Participants do the readings in advance of a weekly fellowship session and then discuss the readings in-session. The curriculum's goal is to introduce people to some of the core principles of effective altruism, to share the arguments for different problems that people in EA work on, and to encourage participants to think about what they want to do on the basis of those ideas.
The below curriculukm in bold is 8-weeks long with 1-2 hours of reading per week and 1-1.5h discussion sessions. The curriculum was developed by staff from CEA, which incorporated feedback from community members, subject matter experts, and fellowship facilitators.
2. Curricula
We recommend you use this 8-week curricula (designed by CEA’s virtual programs team) alongside this facilitator guide. Whilst there may be certain tweaks you might want to make to ensure the syllabus is right for your group, we have had very experienced people spend a lot of time curating the reading list, so recommend you change it minimally or not at all! Below are alternative (yet similar) curricula that function identically.
- Alternative 8-week curricula from EA Oxford: click here for folder.
- Alternative 8-week curricula from EA Stanford: click here for folder. Note, this curricula is more focused on careers.
- Alternative 7-week curricula from EA Harvard: click here for information and here for folder.
- Alternative 6-week curricula from EA St Andrews: click here for syllabus. Note, this curricula has more exercises that participants do for active engagement.