My day, yesterday

7:00 Get up, eat breakfast, check email, be astounded at how many people have read my post on graduate admissions, surf a bit.

7:30 Walk (!) to campus

8:30 Attend the "causal inference in education research seminar" which features a really interesting paper by a graduate student in statistics on bandwidth selection in regression discontinuity designs. Make lots of comments. Think interesting thoughts.

10:00 Walk to my office, check emails, meet with a clever student, be happy that one of my students got a great post-doc offer.

11:30 Attend a junior job talk by an interesting and entertaining job candidate. My colleagues hold the mistaken belief that we gain some sort of strategic advantage by keeping our flyouts a secret, so I cannot say who the candidate was, but the candidate had an Australian accent.

1:00 Have a nice chat about junior hiring and about some graduate students with one of my clever junior colleagues.

1:30 Meet with one of my clever graduate students about our joint paper.

2:00 Meet with one of the students in my undergraduate class about her presentation next week. She is well-prepared and eager to learn more about the methods used in the paper.

2:30 Yesterday was the first day of student presentations of published papers followed by class discussion in my undergraduate seminar on program evaluation. The presenter did a very good job and, unlike in some past years, the discussion took right off among the students so that I hardly had to say anything. This makes me very happy.

4:00 Attend the quantitative methodology seminar at the Institute for Social Research. The presenter is one of my graduate students. She does a good job with her opening my remarks, and then my colleagues, drawn from five or six different departments and schools around campus, provide a non-stop stream of really useful comments on the work. Huge value-added.

6:30 Go to dinner at Zingerman's Roadhouse with the job candidate and two of my clever and entertaining colleagues. The service and the food, as always, are as good as the company.

9:45 Check my email and find out that one of my students (a different one than the one who got the post-doc offer) got another flyout. I am very happy.

The amazing bit: I am paid to have days like this.

Addendum: there are a lot of grumpy people on econjobmarketrumors.

Addendum 2: so the comments on econjobmarketrumors have been on my mind (which is why one should never, ever read comments on econjobmarketrumors). I think the deal is that I write this blog on the assumption that most readers either know me personally, or read regularly, or both. I can see why a reader not in either category might misinterpret both this post and the one on letters of recommendation.  Something to keep in mind going forward as I write.