Frequently Asked Questions

Our fellowships are for students in years 11, 12, or 13 who have not yet started university and who live or study in the UK. Students on a gap year are also welcome.

Our subject-specific fellowships are specifically for students currently studying those subjects (history or maths) — usually at A-Level, but GCSE is fine if you’re in year 11.

The programmes are open to both state and private school students. We're keen to make Leaf's programmes accessible in themselves (especially by offering them free of charge), but Leaf is not an access programme per se; we're aiming to support exceptional teenagers to explore how they can best help others, whatever their background.

Given Leaf’s limited capacity, places to our fellowships are competitive — we expect hundreds of applicants for 25-75 Fellowship places per programme.

However, all applicants will be offered to participate as Independent Learners and given access to use our online learning platform for self-paced exploration. Furthermore, up to 100 Finalists per programme will be invited to join our talks with high-impact professionals and some of our community conversations.

In this way, while our most exceptional applicants will receive a higher level of support, discussion, and recognition, everyone who is interested in the programme (and meets our eligibility criteria) will be able to participate in some way. So there really is no downside in applying!

We’re primarily looking for applicants who are:

(1) Ambitiously altruistic — we will be discussing ideas and tools for how you can contribute to ambitious aims like preventing human extinction or steering the course of history towards a more positive future.

(2) Intellectually curious — this programme is about exploration of important goals, surprising conclusions, and practical tools.

(3) Smart — we will be diving deep into complex topics, and want to ensure a high quality of discussion. For example, we expect most accepted applicants to have or be predicted a high proportion of 9s at GCSE.

We’ve tried to design the application system in a way that fairly assesses the criteria we most care about.

It is very common for excellent potential applicants (arguably especially people of underrepresented demographic groups) to doubt that they meet the requirements for an opportunity. But if you’re not sure, please just apply! We’d appreciate the chance to review your application.

Our programmes are entirely free for participants.

Of course, they cost Leaf money to run; we have staff to pay and various other costs. For accepted Fellows and Finalists, we do ask if you’d like to donate to help us cover these costs. Many participants (or their parents/guardians) have indeed chosen to donate, but this is completely optional.

We aim to empower young people to do good, so it’s important that cost is not a barrier to promising applicants. We want students from underprivileged and underrepresented backgrounds to be able to participate equally.

Our goal really is to support participants to help others, save lives, or change the course of history. We are extremely grateful for the support of philanthropists who share our goals.

There’s more info about our funders on our “About” page, and you can find out more through this video, (although note that some details refer to a residential programme we are no longer running).

Additionally, we are truly grateful that many participants and their parents/guardians choose to support Leaf’s mission by donating to us when they are offered a place. Such donations help to keep Leaf free and accessible to those who truly couldn’t afford to participate otherwise.

William MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford University, has defined effective altruism as:

“(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources… and

(ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the world.”

Effective altruism is both a research question and a community.

Our programmes focus on exploring the research question: how can we do the most good? There are no clear, objective answers here, and it’s not even obvious that this is the best question to be asking. So we encourage participants to both consider and critique the new ideas that they encounter during our programmes.

Leaf’s staff are, to varying extents, part of the effective altruism community, and we’re glad to be able to connect participants to a wider network of researchers, entrepreneurs, and advocates aiming to do as much good as possible.

Great! Dig into that and discuss with your group: is the disagreement values-based, or empirical? What might cause you or the other person to change your mind?

We’re keen on “productive disagreements” and “anti-debates”; we aim to be “scouts” who accurately map out the territory, rather than “soldiers” who defend their position at all costs.

We don’t shy away from bold claims, unorthodox methodologies, or surprising conclusions, but it’s vital to engage critically and carefully with them.

Yes, the programmes are designed specifically to fit around school. And we know that ambitious students often have a bunch of other responsibilities and commitments, too!

Although there are tonnes of fun and engaging extras with your cohort for Fellows and Finalists, most of the core content is self-paced and independent, so even if you’re very busy for several days in a row, you should be able to catch up, as long as you’re happy to make up the time later.

The various calls and opportunities to connect with other participants will usually be on evenings or weekends. You can see in the "Weekly structure" section of each of the course pages (maths, history, AI) the rough timings per week.

For the weekly, tutorial-style discussion calls, we ask about your time availability during the 2nd stage of the application process. If you're invited to join as a Fellow, we'll group you with peers and a facilitator who can all meet at the same weekly slot.

We’re keen for participants to attend as much as possible. The content is interconnected, so some content might not make much sense if you’ve missed the previous bits.

But if you have to miss one of the weekly group discussion calls because you have an unavoidable clash, then of course, we’ll be able to work around that. Just let us know in advance.

Although there are tonnes of fun and engaging extras with your cohort, most of the core content is self-paced and independent, so even if you’re away for a whole week, you should be able to catch up, as long as you’re happy to make up the time later.

We offer alumni small financial grants for actions that would help you accelerate your path to impact.

We are excited to give grants if:

• You have a part-time job that doesn’t have much impact or provide you with much useful learning, and you’d like to use this grant to ‘buy out’ your time to focus on something more impactful.

• You have a plan for an impactful project, and think that a financial reward would substantially increase your motivation and commitment.

• You have a promising plan where financial costs (e.g. subscriptions to online services, travel, accommodation) are a substantial barrier.

These grants must be applied for; they are not guaranteed, and will be awarded based on our evaluation of the promise of your proposal for helping you to have major positive impact (now or later).

There’s no minimum funding amount. To date, most grants we’ve paid out have been between £50 and £300, but we’re open to providing more than this. For more ambitious grant proposals above £1,000, we may help you apply to more substantial grantmakers, such as our own main funders, EA Funds.

Yes. You need to attend at least 4 of the 5 discussion group calls, and there are separate certificates for Fellows, Finalists, and Independent Learners.

We can write references for some purposes too, such as for work experience, scholarship applications, or the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

That’s the plan! Although we can’t promise anything, as it depends on how the current programmes go.

Probably not. But there are a number of other programmes we may or may not offer in the future, such as:

• Online programmes focused on other subjects or causes.

• A 2-day conference in the UK for school students focused on doing good.

• Virtual research or communications work experience at a high-impact nonprofit.

We also might open our programmes up to international applicants.

We can’t make any promises, because we’re regularly adjusting our plans in the light of new feedback and evidence about how our programmes are performing and how promising our other ideas are.

But if you’re interested in staying in the loop, please sign up for updates at the bottom of our homepage.

We’ll look at the BIG picture of history, such as asking: ‘what are the key events in the entire history of technology, science, or philosophy?’ In other cases, we’ll get more specific, such as asking how slavery went from a key facet of the global economy to being almost universally banned and reviled.

Our content selection is focused on identifying the examples, trends, and topics that are most important for driving positive change today. Usually this means looking to relatively modern history, but sometimes we need to cast our eye at least briefly over longer term trends or momentous periods in the more distant past, such as the first agricultural revolution around 10,000 BC.

But if you want to get a better sense of the look and feel of “History to shape history (for the better)”, your best option is to try out the sample activities here.

That’s a shame! You can sign up to our mailing list at the bottom of our homepage to hear about future opportunities.

Thanks very much! We expect some of our most promising applications to come from people who are directly encouraged to apply by people who know them well. So, if you know any teens who might be a good fit for our programmes, please do encourage them to apply!

If you have a particular type of expertise that you think might be helpful to the development of Leaf’s programmes, are supportive of our goals, and are willing to offer advice or pro bono support, please do email info@leaf.courses

You can also sign up to our mailing list at the bottom of our homepage to stay in the loop with future developments.

Cool! Feel free to email your question to info@leaf.courses