EA Cambridge Overview

• Organisers: 1.5 FTE + 17 volunteers
• We are primarily a university group (though approximately one-third of our most engaged members are recent graduates), running ~8 events per week during university term time for EA outreach and community-building.

Career Profile Discussions

• Connect individuals who are interested in pursuing a particular career with EA community members who are already working in that area
• Facilitate the interested individuals’ learning about a particular career path

• Primarily targeted at group members who have developed or are in the process of developing career plans in alignment with EA ideas
• No application process

• Cohort Size/How many events/what you discussed
• We ran 12 of these events in the 2018-19 academic year, with attendance ranging from 1-13 (usually being 4 and 6).
• We talked about typical entry points into various careers, important skills, different roles within the area etc.
• We usually provided catering to make the event feel somewhat fancy.

• If you run the event as we did, it was very expensive.
• It’s probably only worthwhile if you have at least four community members who are interested in a particular career area and likely to be available for an event on the same day.

• These events were not very cost-effective and providing basic snacks seems to work as well as fancier food.
• We found that these events were most often attended by individuals with less prior familiarity with the career area than we intended, though it was often very successful in encouraging those individuals to attend further events.
• For the original target audience, it seems to work better to connect them directly with people with relevant career experience, so that they can arrange a call at a time that suits them.
• When we run events like this now, we only buy simple snacks, and only invite guests to talk about careers that are likely to be of interest to a reasonably large number of attendees, including those less familiar with EA.

Career Dinners

• Create a space for community members to provide feedback on each others’ career plans
• Build a sense of community among the attendees

• Group members who have developed career plans in alignment with EA ideas

• Cohort Size/How many events/what you discussed
• When these worked best, they occurred weekly with 5-6 attendees.
• They were organised in an informal way, with one community member inviting others over to dinner.
• Each week, a different attendee presented their career plan for others to offer feedback.
• The gathering usually lasted for around two to three hours.

• Attendees should either already be comfortable with each other or be likely to become comfortable with each other quickly. This is so feedback can be delivered and received well.
• The dinners are not vital, and the event could be run in less time (e.g. 1 hour)
• Focusing on one individual per event seems important for ensuring that everyone’s focus stays on them

• In this academic year, we tried to split community members into groups according to their existing friendships and appointed one member in each group to be responsible for organising the dinners.
• However, not very many dinners took place when organised in this way, and in future, we will probably revert to the original plan of having one dedicated person invite a small number of people to an initial set of gatherings. Further groups could hopefully spin-off from that.