High schoolers can apply to the Atlas Fellowship: $50k scholarship + summer program

post by sydney (sydney-von-arx) · 2022-04-03T00:53:05.397Z · LW · GW · 18 comments

Contents

  Summary
  About the program
  Why we’re doing this
    Why high school?
None
18 comments

Summary

• Jonas Vollmer, Ashley Lin, and I are starting the Atlas Fellowship, a $50,000 scholarship + all-expenses-paid summer program for ~100 talented high school students from across the world, funded by Open Philanthropy and the FTX Future Fund.
• If you’re in high school or age 14–19 anywhere in the world, you can apply here by April 10th!
• If you encourage a student to apply and we accept them into the program, you get $500.
• You can see templates to share the program and more details on nominations in our outreach guide.
• We’re hiring (including internships, remote roles, and part-time roles). Learn more here!

About the program

If you read LessWrong, you probably have some sense of what it means to pursue a goal, to actually try [? · GW] to win [LW · GW]. We want to help you do that (especially, but not exclusively, if your goal improves the world). We want to give you the chance to not worry about money or deadlines or sending prestigious signals to others and to just do something badass that actually matters.

In particular, if you're the kind of exceptionally talented individual we're looking for, we want to give you:

• $50,000 for education + professional development
• Our outlines of an understanding of rationality and how the world works, and all the prerequisites needed for this (ex: Fermi estimates, big history, inside views)
• Sessions, tutoring, and other resources to help you build object-level technical skills (including AI alignment, economics, probability theory, type theory, statistics, proofs, linear algebra, machine learning, genomics and more)
• College admissions support (or help with your own projects)
• Connections to other exceptional people interested in improving the world
• A fun summer experience

If this sounds interesting, apply here by April 10th!

Why we’re doing this

The world is full of problems that are bottlenecked on talent. But much of the world’s talent is stuck in high school spending their free time rowing to get into Harvard or otherwise trying to send costly signals of academic ability. We think our program will give high school students the intellectual environment, courage, and resources to start working on things that matter instead.

Why high school?

• Less competition, fewer other good opportunities: while bright college students or adults have many exciting opportunities available to them (including opportunities from others in our community), there’s almost nothing for high-school students.
• Less locked-in to existing career paths: the rowing and the Harvards don’t really end, and the longer people stay on that track, the harder it is to get them to start tackling the world’s biggest problems.
• Potentially more fluid intelligence: we tentatively hypothesize that the younger people are when they learn difficult technical topics, the longer they will be able to help solve challenging intellectual problems at peak fluid intelligence. (Though this reason isn't a crux for us and we haven't looked into it very carefully.)

If you have more questions about the program, check out our FAQ on our site, leave a comment or email ashley@atlasfellowship.org.

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