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Supplementing Summer Program for Applied Rationality and Cognition 2026 (SPARC)
ProposalGrant
Closes August 1st, 2026$5,000raised
$2,500minimum funding
$10,000funding goal
Offer to donate
7 daysleft to contribute
You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
Project summary
The Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition (SPARC) is a free ten-day program for roughly 30 talented math and science students, along with curriculum in math and science, we emphasise developing of skills in various rationality and rationality-adjacent topics: estimation, causal inference, AI literacy (more safety oriented), and agency.
What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?
We aim to equip our students with the skills necessary to navigate our rapidly changing world. They come to SPARC with competencies in math, physics, and biology—for example, this year three of our students previously attended the International Mathematics Olympiad.
But they’re interested in fields like mechanistic interpretability, consciousness, and policy. They wish to expand their understanding of the world more broadly, which necessitates developing a different set of skills—among them, a sense of their own agency; a sense that they can go beyond the confines of their high school (or college) classes.
In terms of achieving them, our classes cover a wide range of relevant topics. Our markets class is taught by a former Jane Street trader; our AI Safety classes are taught by staff who’ve worked at MATS and BlueDot. We also run technical math and science classes on type theory, topology, statistics, and more.
Beyond our classes, we host activities: pair programming sessions; a Fermithon to improve students’ calibration; guest talks from Anthropic, Stripe, Citadel, and more.
To inculcate student agency, we encourage students to run their own activities and pursue their own projects at camp. In previous years, students have built software to play a real-life version of Hunters versus Speedrunners, a popular Minecraft mod; have acquired the necessary resources and then constructed the largest origami dragon in the world; have built a physical zip line at camp to deliver food from one building to another. Our alumni have gone on to found high valuation companies and publish notable research.
How will this funding be used?
This funding will be used to supplement student projects both during and after SPARC 2026. Encouraging students to pursue their personal projects gives them the confidence to later pursue larger, more ambitious visions. SPARC has previously supported students in running math competitions at their colleges, building hacker and writer retreats, and helping international and lower-income alumni apply to American colleges.
As a rough breakdown, SPARC costs about 100-150k a year to run for ~11 days and ~30 students. At the higher end, this works out to ~$450 per student per day.
Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?
Our director, Yan Zhang, previously earned his mathematics PhD from MIT, and now works as a mathematics professor at San Jose State University. Other staff members include employees at Goodfire, MATS, and Hudson River Trading; and graduate students in natural language processing, biostatistics, and political science.
We’ve successfully run SPARC each year since 2012.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?
If SPARC stops running at some point in the future, it will most likely be because the instructor team has moved on to other projects. We do not anticipate this happening within the next few years.
How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?
$120k, from quant sponsors, which we'd like to avoid being the sole sponsors of SPARC.