CLOSED: Internship in Cause Prioritization

Table of Contents

    Overview

    Open Philanthropy has a staff of ~80 and currently gives away over $400 million per year with the aim of doing as much good as we can per dollar, in causes like global health and development, biosecurity, and scientific research. Over the next decade, we plan to increase our giving while continuing to raise our bar for impact. To do so, we need to assess our impact in our current cause areas, figure out how to spend more effectively within them, and explore whether there are additional promising areas we should be expanding into.

    We’re looking for strong interns/externs to help us do this work! We’re open to a variety of backgrounds, but all applicants must be enrolled in an undergraduate or master’s degree program at the time that they are applying and be concluding that program within 12 months, or work at an organization that offers externship/secondment opportunities, or be in a doctoral program. We expect the strongest applicants will be enrolled in master’s or doctoral programs in the social sciences.

     

    About the Global Health & Wellbeing team

    The Global Health & Wellbeing cause prioritization team focuses on investigating potential new cause areas, prioritizing across causes, and recommending new grants. Much of the team’s work focuses on policy, scientific research, and global development work aimed at improving lives as much as possible by reducing premature deaths and increasing incomes, particularly for the world’s poorest people. Open Philanthropy’s current cause areas are the result of research weighing different evidence to arrive at the areas where we believed we could have the greatest impact per dollar. Additional expansion will take a similarly open-minded and quantitative approach while incorporating lessons learned from our current causes.

    In 2021, we announced hires to lead grantmaking in global aid advocacy and South Asian air quality, two new cause areas we added as a result of the team’s research. In 2022 we hired program officers in global health R&D and effective altruism community building (global health and wellbeing). We additionally ran the Regranting Challenge, a $150 million initiative to fund high impact teams at other funders, and the Cause Exploration Prizes (with support from 2022 summer interns), where we invited people to suggest new areas for us to support.

    We are continuing to work to identify new giving areas that can beat our ambitious social ROI bar. Over the coming years, the team will directly (through grantmaking) and indirectly (through hiring new program officers) decide how to distribute billions in new giving.

     

    About the internship

    We’re looking for students currently enrolled in degree programs (or people whose work offers externship/secondment opportunities) to apply for a research internship from June-August 2023 and help us investigate important questions and causes. We see the internship as a way to grow our capacity, develop promising research talent, and expand our recruiting pipeline for full-time roles down the line. We plan to treat interns as team members working on the team’s core priorities, while also showing them how Open Philanthropy works and helping them build skills important for cause prioritization research.

    Most projects will take the form of “opinionated, short research briefs” – synthesizing expert opinion, academic research, and prior views to get to a bottom line on an important question or promising area. Examples of projects our interns have taken on in the past include:

    We expect that future interns will work on additional shallow investigations on diverse and potentially highly impactful topics — such as community health workers in low- and lower-middle income countries, the elimination of non-compete clauses from employment contracts, and vaccine adjuvants. Interns will work on multiple projects of different depths, in the same way as full-time team members. Specific projects will depend on the team’s needs and the intern’s skills. Interns will report to an existing cause prioritization team member and participate in team meetings and discussions, including presenting their work to the team for feedback.

    Like the day-to-day work of our full-time Research and Strategy Fellows, the internship would require:

    • Talking to global experts, reviewing reports or academic papers, and working with potential grantees to decide whether a potential cause area is important, neglected, and tractable.
    • Dividing time between gathering new information and synthesizing it into concrete recommendations.
    • Working to get the right answer, not to summarize others’ views. This will require making reasonable judgment calls and being willing to tackle a problem from multiple angles to check your logic.
    • Being able to write clearly and well, with strong reasoning transparency.
    • Doing back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate social returns and valuations.
    • Working in a way that is aligned with Open Philanthropy’s core operating values of openness, ownership, calibration and inclusiveness.

     

    Who might be a good fit

    We’re open to a variety of backgrounds, but all applicants must be enrolled in a degree program at the time that they are applying (with at least one semester remaining), or work at an organization that offers externship/secondment opportunities. Enrolled applicants must be no more than 1 year away from graduation in an undergraduate or master’s program, or must be in their 2nd year or higher in a doctoral program. If you have any questions about your eligibility, please feel free to reach out to jobs@openphilanthropy.org.

    We expect that successful applicants will likely have a background in social science (including, but not limited to, having or working towards a master’s or PhD in a social science topic), comfort with quantitative approaches and methods, and experience in topics that are core to the GHW approach, such as economic development/growth, public health, scientific research, etc.

    In the application form, we’ll offer a choice between Research and Strategy tracks, which map to the distinction between our full-time Research and Strategy Fellow positions. In general, both tracks often work on similar types of problems and there are many overlapping skills between the two tracks. However, the Research track involves deeper familiarity with social science research and more comfort interrogating the methodologies used in economics, political science, and similar fields, while the Strategy track tends to rely more on quicker, more assumptions-driven calculations, as well as projects that are more focused on how to “make something happen” in the world.

    We anticipate hiring more Research track interns than Strategy interns, so if you’re uncertain which sounds like a better fit for you, we’d encourage you to select the Research track (but otherwise encourage people to select whichever fits their background and interests better).

     

    How to apply

    Please apply by 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on February 26 to be considered. We will evaluate all applicants as a cohort after that date.

    The process will have three main steps: initial application, completion of a work test (for which we offer an honorarium payment to acknowledge applicants’ time), and several interviews with the team.

     

    Additional Information

    • These are temporary, full-time, paid positions. Our plan is for the internships to run for 10-12 weeks from June 5 to August 11-25, though we’re open to limited adjustments based on academic calendars. Potential interns must be available for 40 hours per week during their internships for at least the ten weeks following June 5.
    • Compensation will be based on our entry-level researcher salary and will be $1,900 per week.
    • This position is remote. However, we encourage interns to co-locate with their manager for 1-2 weeks of the internship, e.g. during our organization-wide “Togetherness Week” in San Francisco. Open Philanthropy will pay for flights and temporary lodging during this travel.
    • We are happy to consider applicants currently studying in the United States on student visas and provide any supporting documentation they may need to be eligible for this internship. However, we don’t control who is and isn’t eligible for a visa and can’t guarantee approval under the applicant’s student visa program.
    • We may be able to hire a successful applicant who lacks U.S. work authorization to work remotely abroad.

    We aim to employ people with many different experiences, perspectives and backgrounds who share our passion for accomplishing as much good as we can. We are committed to creating an environment where all employees have the opportunity to succeed, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status. 

    If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact jobs@openphilanthropy.org.