Growing up, I was always curious why some people felt compelled to help others while others didn't. I joined a neuroscience lab studying altruistic kidney donors — people who would donate their kidney to a stranger — and became obsessed with understanding what drives people like this. That's when I first heard about effective altruism. Now I work at Coefficient Giving as a grantmaker, helping to move money more effectively to our grantees.
I've always been motivated to help others, but nothing ever felt good enough. There were always more people to be helped, more lives to be saved from suffering. I discovered the principles of effective altruism one day when I was researching the word "altruism”. Suddenly I found there was an entire community of people thinking about the same things that I was grappling with, and thinking about them deeply enough that they were actually changing their life paths to address the world’s problems.
There wasn't an effective altruism university group where I was studying, so I reached out to do an intro fellowship at another university. My first mentor, Jessica McCurdy, helped me think differently about impact. I was fixated on pursuing neuroscience as my path to helping people, but she encouraged me to think more broadly: if my goal was really to help as many people as possible, maybe there were other careers or ways to give that would have even greater impact. That conversation unlocked something important in my brain.
"Effective altruism gave me a sense of hope for the world and an avenue through which I could actually have an impact."
What originally drew me to effective altruism was scope sensitivity — paying attention to the scale of impact we can have. Organizations like the Against Malaria Foundation distribute bed nets that cost just a few dollars each but can prevent deadly malaria infections. When I realized that my donations could actually save lives — not just improve them, but save them — that felt incredible.
What keeps me engaged now is the intellectual humility that’s also associated with effective altruism. We don't know what the right answer is on how to help others, but we're gonna do our best to figure out. People in this movement are constantly questioning their assumptions and questioning how to do things better to have greater impact.
"Effective altruism is a framework for thinking about doing good better. We're always open to being proven wrong."
My advice for other young people: When you're in university and being faced with all the problems of the world, it's easy to feel disheartened. For me, effective altruism paved a path and gave me an avenue through which I could actually make changes in the world. If helping others is important to you, get curious about effective altruism.
