EA - EA orgs should accept Summer 2023 interns in January by Abby Hoskin

Link to original articleWelcome 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: EA orgs should accept Summer 2023 interns in January, published by Abby Hoskin on November 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TLDR; EA organizations hiring graduating seniors or hosting undergraduates as 2023 summer interns should send program acceptances in January 2023 so that students don't have to accept a corporate offer before they apply to EA programs.The ProblemMultiple undergrads have complained that you can't apply to corporate internships and EA summer programs at the same time. Instead, non-EA orgs have very early deadlines (October to January), allowing them to get decisions back to students very early in the year. They typically want responses from students within a few weeks of sending out offers. Meanwhile, many EA orgs don't send out acceptances until much later, like April, well past the deadline for responding to the corporate internship offers.This puts students in an awkward position: either accept the corporate offers while planning to renege if they get a better EA internship, or gamble on the EA jobs, and potentially not get any. It's bad to miss out on anything for the summer, but lying violates most people's moral principles and going back on an offer that you previously accepted burns bridges at the organization you lied to.As a result of this application deadline system, many talented students are being funneled away from EA summer opportunities.The SolutionIdeally, students could apply for corporate programs and EA fellowships at the same time, see where they are accepted, and take the best offer without having to lie or burn bridges.Moving EA program deadlines up to compete with industry might be challenging for orgs that aren't 100% sure what kind of funding they'll have for summer programs. In this case, consider what kind of guidelines you can provide to prospective candidates to give them a better sense of how likely they will be accepted for a summer program at your org. Also, consider doing early acceptances if an extremely talented student contacts you with an exploding offer from another organization, and publicizing this policy if you decide to enact it.The CompetitionHere are some summer 2023 internship application deadlines for corporations competing with us for top talent (ie this is how early applications need to open in order to get offers back to students on a competitive timeframe):TechnologyGoogle: October 31st, 2022Palantir: Sometime in October 2022ConsultingBain: November 29, 2022McKinsey: January 19th, 2023FinanceGoldman Sachs: November 20th, 2022JP Morgan: November 27th, 2022NB: Many of these organizations have multiple summer programs which all have different deadlines. I've tried to select programs with representative deadlines, but bizarrely, some companies even have different deadlines for students from different universities! If you actually want to apply to one of these places, please go to the org's website to double check the deadline for the program that best suits you.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.