Brainy career advice

I try not to link to things that MR links to (because I think my readers are approximately a small subset of theirs) but this piece of career advice from a neuroscientist is really good.

Advice to little girls

... from Mark Twain. Delightful text, and pictures too.

I especially like the one about humoring one's parents.

The problems of prestigious universities

A really excellent essay from the American Scholar, the publication of Phi Beta Kappa, that lays out the problems with elite higher education in the US as it presently operates.

The essay is more negative than I would be. I don't think any reorganization of the system would produce all that many more of the sort of intellectual seekers that the author really wants to have as students, but maybe we could reduce the number of self-inflated jerks that the system produces. And the bonus slam at George W. Bush, itself an example of the sort of behavior the author is complaining about, sounds an off note in an essay otherwise well above partisan politics.

In reading the essay, as in my academic life more generally, I find myself with mixed feelings. At times I am very grateful to have gone to deeply mediocre public primary and secondary schools and to Big State U precisely because they kept me in contact with people very different from myself. At other times I regret all the learning that didn't happen because I did not press my parents to send me to a private high school, which they probably would have done if I had pushed a bit, and because I did not press myself to go to a more elite college, though I might well have gotten into one. People who wear their Harvard pedigrees on their sleeves annoy me, but so do anti-intellectuals who denigrate the value of scholarship. Mixed, mixed, mixed.

Recommended for students, professors and parents.

Advice for new lawyers

Good stuff from the WSJ, much of which translates pretty easily into economics land (or even sociology land).

I would emphasize the part about liking your job and the part about being careful to get realistic evaluations of your work as you move along the tenure track (or its analogue in government or the private sector). The part about having multiple cheerleaders is good too. Don't rely on one senior faculty member to pull you through a close tenure case. Make sure you've got a whole team.

Really good writing advice

I like this column on academic writing a lot.

I think the most useful point is the first one, which I would reword to say that learning-by-doing is the way to learn to write. Reading is helpful too, and reading in particular with an eye toward the structure of the argument rather than just to the substance.

I would add three other bits:

11. Even if your paper is not as good as the last paper you read by Heckman (or the alternative famous and brilliant scholar of your choice) it can still be a really useful scientific contribution. There are plenty of great papers out there that never see the light of day because their authors compare them to the best one percent of papers and find them wanting. That is not the relevant standard. The relevant standard is: does this paper add to the existing body of knowledge?

12. I find that giving talks is really helpful in writing papers in the sense that I find it easier and more natural to develop the "story" aspect of papers in the context of a seminar presentation than when writing. Once I have the story, the writing is much easier.

13. Blogging is really good writing practice.

Advice and prediction

The folks at orgtheory.net offer some good advice to young scholars in regard to journal submissions. The large fraction of desk rejections at many journals suggests that this advice is not being widely heeded.

In regard to the very top journals, I think one of two things will happen over time: either publications in the the top few journals will become less important relative to publications in the next level down or, as the top journals switch to solely electronic publishing, they will take more articles, so that the quality bar returns to what it was 25 or 30 years ago when many fewer scholars were writing articles of a quality level that made them potential top journal publications.

Right now, a handful of editors and their idiosyncratic tastes about what is interesting have way too much effect on the career outcomes of junior people.

Job market advice

Yesterday I heard what struck me as some of the worst economics job market advice ever. That advice is to not tell the faculty members on your committee what schools and organizations you have interviews with at the meetings. The idea seems to be that if your committee knows your interview list as it builds up, they may be tempted to tell some schools that have no chance of hiring you that they should not interview you, thus reducing the total number of interviews you achieve.

Here are some reasons why this is bad advice:

1. The number of interviews is not a performance measure to be compared in some sort of sad contest.

2. At some number of interviews, quality starts to decline due to exhaustion, lack of food, and inability to be on time. A reasonable number of well-matched interviews is optimal.

3. You should not want to interview at places that have no chance of hiring you. You are wasting their time and your own. Your career is a repeated game with all of the other economists you interact with. People remember things. Plus you are taking the interview slot away from someone who might be a good match to the place that you are not a good match for. That's not very nice.

4. Your committee can give you valuable advice on the people who will be interviewing you at particular departments, but they can only do this if you let them know where you are interviewing.

5. It may be that there are particular places that people on your committee think would be a good match for you. If they do not schedule you right away, it may be time to shake the tree a bit, but the tree can only be shaken if people on your committee know your interview schedule. More broadly, if your initial interviews seem to not be as good as they should be, there is a window during which faculty can try to do something about that, but only if they are informed about what is going on.

My advice is to keep your committee informed and to be completely honest with the people you are interviewing with about both interviews and flyouts. More information makes the system work better and partially informed attempts to extract some strategic gain through withholding information are at least as likely to make your worse off, in the short run or the long run or both, as to make you better off.

New Year's resolutions as highway signs

MR does wedding planning

Marginal Revolution ventures into wedding planning. Read the comments, some of which hint at some very funny stories.

Some thoughts of my own:

1. If your prospective partner is really, really into the surface aspects of the wedding and into counting the $$ spent as a measure of your affection, think carefully about marrying the person. One of the things I most value about my wife is how little she cares about this sort of thing.

2. I actually much prefer the video we had done to the photographs. The video is particularly nice for people who could not come to the wedding but really wanted to, and there will always be some of those. I'd spend on a good videographer and be sure to have them walk around talking to the guests.

3. Our reception was "dry" but at a hotel with a bar. My economist friends sorted the solution out pretty quickly.

4. If you are older and well-established when you get married, I suggest skipping the gifts altogether. We did, and asked people to give us their "words of wisdom" instead. This worked really, really well. Periodically we will go back and dive into the box of words of wisdom and re-read some of them. It always makes for a fun, informative and romantic time. Plus a few folks did their "words of wisdom" live at the reception. Both the economists and the relatives proved remarkably entertaining. My favorite line was from my cousin, who suggested imagining your partner naked when having an argument.

Subject line of the week

I received an email on Friday with the subject line:

"sorry for multiple e-mails - got a job"

I still laugh every time I think about it.

Just to clarify for the students who read this: yes, I am very busy, and yes, I get a lot of emails. But emails telling me that you got a job offer do not need to be apologized for!

Really.

And congrats to the job-offer-getting student, who got the exact job she wanted.

Email etiquette for students

A fine post from Chris Blattman lays out the rights and wrongs of student emails to professors.

I had a student at Western Ontario email from an email address along the lines of "longdong5@hotmail.ca". Not a good idea.

The comments are interesting too. Like Chris, my personal rule is to have undergraduates call me "Prof. Smith" and graduate students call me "Jeff".

Exactly!

Wow ... does this ring true:

Procrastination is a best-response to perfectionism. A perfectionist spends too much time on a task, so she should optimally procrastinate so that the deadline disciplines her to work quickly and settle for imperfection.

I think the point is even broader. Particular tasks expand to fill the time available. The only way to be sure not to spend too much time is to wait until only the optimal amount of time is available.

From Cheap Talk.

On cleaning the house

The Guardian (!) publishes some old-school cleaning advice that seems like it should have ended up in the Daily Telegraph.

My favorite bit:

There's no such thing as a cleaning cheat You can hide mess and disguise stains, but something is either clean or it isn't. If you have people coming and the place isn't clean, just tidy up the clutter and focus on the ambience – candles, flowers and low lighting all work wonders. Make time to get yourself ready, too.

The bit I did not know:

Towels go hard because washing powder and fabric softeners leave mineral deposits in the fibres, which are then baked in as the towels dry. To ensure you have soft towels at all times, wash in laundry liquid rather than powder, and take out of the dryer or off the line before they're bone dry. Soaking hard towels in a solution of water and white vinegar (145ml vinegar: 4.5 litres of water) will bring them back to life.

For readers not familiar with the solar system of British newspapers, a piece on housecleaning that really belonged in the Guardian would recommend cleaning not as exercise, as in this piece, but as a nice way to overcome class biases and bond with the workers (before going out for Thai food and the theater).

Gates Foundation project

Some of the papers from the Gates Foundation project on evaluating innovative health interventions in developing countries I was involved with have now been published in the journal Health Economics. These are the stronger papers from the project.

Among the people I did not know prior to starting the project but got to know as a result of it, the Iranian group ("Family planning ...") and Jean-Louis Arcand ("Teacher training ...") were particularly impressive. Indeed, being the methods "mentor" for the Iranian group, who did not really need my help, changed my views on Iran quite a lot, as the policy being evaluated highlights aspects of internal politics within Iran with which I was quite unfamiliar. The papers by the people I did already know - Rodrigo Soares was a junior colleague of mine at Maryland and Rebecca Thornton is a junior colleague at Michigan - also impressed me.

One lesson that I learned from this project is that researchers who participate in things like this should get promises about publication outlets in writing before they commit to participating. Some of the papers in the Health Economics special issue could have been published in more prestigious journals but were not because the project organizers wanted to put all the best papers in a single special issue of a journal. The tradeoff here is between the promotion of the project as a whole, which is easier with a special issue, and the interests of the individual researchers, many of whom are untenured assistant professors, who want to get their own work in the best possible journals. I have no problem with making the tradeoff in favor of the project as a whole if the decision to do so is all spelled out in advance, but in this case it was not. This in turn led to some conflict and ill will during the course of the project, along with a bad taste afterwards, all of which could easily have been avoided.

Job talk rules

These are written for sociologists but pretty much all carry over to economics.

I would highlight the following:

1. Practice your talk a lot.

2. Don't BS when answering questions. If you don't know, say so, and write it down. Following up later by email in such cases is a good idea as well. You lose fewer points (if any) for not knowing than you do if you get caught fibbing.

3. Be interested and enthusiastic about your work. I am always amazed at how many people act bored with their own work or do not seem to take responsibility for it, as if they are presenting something written by others in a class. It is your work; if you don't think it is cool, no one else is going to. And if you don't think it is cool, you should not be on the job market.

Career advice from the WSJ

The WSJ offers some career advice, some of which strikes me as wise and other bits of which seem either comical or scary.

The administrative assistant who spends her time listening at the rest room door to be sure that job candidates wash their hands is the scariest. This also sounds like a potential liability issue for the firm.

Perhaps most comical is the suggestion to network via your hair stylist.

More generally, the article seems to encourage a focus on trivialities of form rather than on substance. For example, consider the suggestion that firms should reject applicants who make minor errors on their cover letters. This issue is a bit personal as my friends at one particular economics consulting firm took a pass on one of our very best undergraduates over just this issue. I am leaving the firm anonymous because I am embarrassed for them for making interview decisions in this way.

I cannot say how ridiculous this seems to me, particularly because the norm in academia is not even to read cover letters. Certainly when I have done graduate admissions or junior hiring, I have ignored them completely as they never contain any useful information. My sense is that this is what everyone else does as well.

The serious, and broader, point from this example is that context matters. Some of the suggestions in the WSJ article might well work just fine in sectors like banking but would have exactly the opposite of the intended effect in an academic context, where too much attention to form is taken a signal that substance is lacking. By all means, shower, wear clean clothes to interviews and try and be organized in dealing with potential employers. But looking and acting like an MBA on stimulants will probably turn more people off than it turns on.

I do like the article's advice to "pay it forward", which I interpret as simply being a nice person, even when you do not have to. Being a nice person has a surprisingly high payoff in academia. Having a reputation as a jerk, on the other hand, can close doors.

How not to ask questions

A young person who is going to find his or her initial employment experiences very disappointing, if indeed he or she manages to have any.

Hat tip: David Figlio

Dissertation (and career) advice from Chris Blattman

Almost all of Blattman's advice carries directly over into economics.

Key bits:

Whatever way you go, remember that you need to be on tomorrow’s frontier, not yesterday’s. If this sounds anxiety-producing, it is. Angst and anxiety are the fertile soil from which dissertations grow.

If you think that sounds miserable, wait until you start thinking about your tenure packet.

Actually, it’s only miserable in the worst moments. Most of the time it’s exciting and rewarding. You get out of bed every day and push your brain to its limits. Those limits expand a little bit every day. People will eventually pay you to do this, even though you would secretly do it for free.

Ultimately, you should be doing what you love. If you don’t love it, chances are you won’t be any good at it. So keep that a first priority. But pushing yourself to the frontier is often rewarding for its own sake, and pays off in your academic career. Try to keep that in mind during the most anxious, vexing moments. I do.

I would add a remark in regard to the value of leaving graduate school with more than one skill. Specialization is good in general but you want a bit of insurance against sudden changes in disciplinary enthusiasm for particular tools or styles of work.

This piece also reminds me of my former colleague Ig Horstmann, who told one incoming class of graduate students at Western Ontario that "I wake up every morning and think `Thank God I am an economist'". I second that emotion.

A Chicago story

This is a story told about Theodore W. Schultz, who was for many years on the faculty at Chicago. During my time there as a graduate student I think he had already retired, but he would still show up at seminars from time to time and make smart comments. The story is in the form of bullet points as it comes from a talk given by another economist in honor of Schultz.

He [Schultz] was a very wise and kind man.

One lesson he taught me I carry to this day.

Chicago economics in the early 70s was a rough-house
environment. Browbeating and intimidation, especially
of students, were natural by-products.

Responding to this ethos when I first arrived, one day
I demolished a student’s work at a seminar where Ted
was present.

Later, Ted took me aside and told me that I had made
some excellent, helpful points.

But he also encouraged me to “remember that today’s
student is tomorrow’s colleague, and you will be together
in this profession for many years. Be kind and
they will remember.”

This advice actually extends more broadly. Economics is a very small world. Being nice, interested and respectful has a high payoff and, beyond that, is both more pleasant and the right thing to do.

Grad school advice

Someone called Penelope, the brazen careerist, offers up some advice about grad school in recession times. She is against it.

The post is funny at points, and worth reading as an antidote to the sort of "the future is in plastics" type of career advice one sometimes hears, in which one particular career or set of careers is posited as a sure thing, regardless of the talents or interests of the advisee.

At the same time, some of the advice seems quite misguided. The health care sector seems likely to experience changes in its industrial organization whether or not they come from the government, but that fact does not change the crude demographics of an aging population, which suggests increases in demand in future years.

Sure, science jobs have relatively low money wages, and yet there are still queues for them, as there are to be, say, an English professor. This suggests that the non-money aspects of their compensation are viewed as valuable. In notation, what matters is U and not Y and for most people, Y is not the only argument in the U function. [For non-economist readers, U is the utility function and Y is earnings in this example.]

I will agree with a couple of points. Going to a low-rated but expensive business school is likely not worth the trouble. And some fields are risky. If you want to be an English professor and not a writer of technical manuals, getting a doctorate in English is a necessary but hardly a sufficient condition. On the other hand, some graduate degrees are pretty low risk - anything in statistics, computer science or economics comes to mind.

Hat tip: reason.com