Yesterday Stefan Bender of the IAB (the "German Bureau of Labor Statistics") stopped by Michigan to give a bonus seminar describing the amazing data available to international researchers. The seminar, organized by my tireless junior colleague Rudi Bachmann with a bit of cheerleading on the side from yours truly, was a great success with a very large turnout from economics, the biz school, ISR and other parts of the university.
The mysterious part is that we advertised, both at the start and at the end of the seminar, the opportunity to have drinks with Stefan later in the day at Ashley's. Implicitly we were offering free beer (paid for not by the university, which is of course illegal under Michigan law, but by after-tax dollars out of faculty pockets) to graduate students in addition to providing them with an opportunity to interact informally with both Stefan and various faculty members. Such opportunities are relatively infrequent at Michigan, not so much due to lack of desire but simply because the faculty are really, really busy. My model of graduate students says we should have netted a large fraction of those in attendance at the seminar. Instead, we had exactly one, whom we then had to cajole at length into having a free dinner afterwards. Odd behavior, indeed.
Possible explanations: (1) the "free" part was not obvious enough; (2) one or both of Rudi and I are too intimidating; (3) the students thought we would all speak German over drinks. I think (1) is wrong and (2) conflicts with my self-image though, I am told, not with the views of all of our students. Theory (3) cannot explain the fact that none of the handful of graduate students at the seminar who actually speak German showed up either; it is also inconsistent with the quality of my rather patchy German.
Odd, odd, odd.
Whew.
8 years ago
