Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is:Penn EA Residency Takeaways, published by Thomas Kwa on the AI Alignment Forum. Thanks to Zack Dugue, Oliver Habryka, Adam Krivka, and the Penn EA team for useful comments. In September 2021, sydv and I (Thomas Kwa) helped revive the University of Pennsylvania EA group through a residency. We think this went very well, and the ~300 hours invested during the 3 weeks we were there probably sped up the group by 4 months, and possibly made the group significantly better overall [3]. As of November 2021, Penn EA is currently a thriving group with six organizers, ~30 Intro Program participants and ~20 weekly dinner attendees, and potential to grow further into its huge 10,000 undergrad population, whereas I'd guess the counterfactual looks something like slowly building up to this size over the course of ~8 months with significant risk of the group dying again. What is a residency? In (our model of) a residency, one or two EA community builders travel to a large university at the start of the school year, and spend at least 1 FTE building a new or existing EA student group. At the end, the group is handed off to students, and there might be a retreat for new organizers. The primary goal is to build organizer capacity to rapidly make the group large and self-sustaining (at least 2 students with 10h/week each); a secondary goal is general community-building. Penn is strong evidence that this model can work well. It's only one data point, but we think a lot of the success is generalizable. Note there were other residencies this fall that didn't go as well. Misc comments Sydney (a Stanford student) and I (a Caltech student) were able to invest this much time despite being full-time students with our own groups to run because Penn starts 3 weeks earlier than Caltech or Stanford. [1] Our time was mostly spent building the website, tabling (sitting outside in a high-traffic area and advertising the club), having one-on-ones with prospective organizers and others who signed up through the website, organizing and speaking at events like intro sessions and dinners, other advertising (like flyers) and organizing a retreat (see below). Of these actions, we spent the most time tabling. But one-on-ones and the retreat were the most efficient use of time, as they build organizer capacity. The other actions are still roughly as good as standard university organizer time, given the importance of the first few weeks of uni. Tabling: At Penn, it's really hard to send emails to the whole school. Emails are necessary to get attendance at events. We used the labor-intensive but very effective strategy of tabling to collect ~900 emails, and averaged ~20 emails and ~1 Intro Program application per hour (more on club fair days). Just as importantly, we met a couple more potential organizers. We highly recommend that group organizers read our Guide to Tabling, because following these practices more than doubled our tabling effectiveness. One-on-ones: Sydney did most of these; the goal was to identify potential organizers / active members and what they might contribute to the club, and also just get to know people. I think there were about 20 one-hour 1-1s. Retreat: We ran a weekend retreat for Mid-Atlantic region EA group organizers after the residency, with a total of ~30 people including ~8 from Penn. Retreats are out of scope of this post, but we think they're great and pair well with residencies; all the newly excited people you've had 1-1s with can talk to each other and learn more about EA and EA community building. We did expensive messaging experiments which were inconclusive (we technically started 3 different clubs, and tabled once as Penn Rationality and a couple times as Penn Impactful Careers). In the end we stuck with neutral EA branding, roughly "we want to help students solve the wor...