Tucson Effective Altruism (TEA) is a student-run club with the goal of motivating ambitious and altruistically-minded students to work on some of the most pressing global problems using their skills, careers, and resources.

We are a local EA club at the University of Arizona in the ever-sunny Tucson, AZ.

To learn more about our club events and EA, scroll below. All our links can be found here.

What we do as a club

As a club, we aim to:
— Provide programming that introduces students to concepts relevant to maximizing impact
— Offer workshops and resources that help students plan an impact-oriented career
— Create a space where impact-minded students can convene together and rigorously discuss meaningful ideas
— Cultivate a supportive community and foster long-lasting connections!

Our Fall '24 activities are as follows:

1. PHIL 400/500 — Introduction to Global Priorities: a hybrid course that aims to answer questions such as: "What are the some of the most pressing global priorities? How do we assess the importance of these problems? And how do we best allocate our time and resources to solve them?"

2. Writing to Learn (W2L): A program geared towards those who have completed the introductory course, encouraging them to dive deeper into questions related to effective altruism, philosophy, and cause areas of interest. For Fall '24, this is our primary activity for graduated fellows.

3. Career Planning: For our graduated fellows, we have previously run career planning sessions that included an introduction to different career planning approaches and practical guides on CV/resume-building, application preparation, etc.

4. Campus Outreach: Find us at the UA Mall during the club fair and tell us about your favorite ethical dilemma!

5. One-on-one guidance: Meet with our club facilitators to learn about some of the most impactful career pathways and how to design one for yourself.

What is Effective Altruism (EA)?

"Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.

It's both a research field, which aims to identify the world's most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.

This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources.

This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world's biggest problems.

Effective altruism was formalized by scholars at Oxford University, but has now spread around the world, and is being applied by tens of thousands of people in more than 70 countries.

People inspired by effective altruism have worked on projects that range from funding the distribution of 200 million malaria nets, to academic research on the future of AI, to campaigning for policies to prevent the next pandemic.

They're not united by any particular solution to the world's problems, but by a way of thinking. They try to find unusually good ways of helping, such that a given amount of effort goes an unusually long way."

For an extended introductory description, see the Centre for Effective Altruism's guide here.