Interviews with Heckman graduate students

On pages 10-11 of the Spring-Summer 2011 issue of Dialogo, the magazine (on line but for one print issue per year) that the Division of the Social Sciences at Chicago produces for its alumni, you can find interviews with three Heckman students.

I don't know how the particular students interviewed for the piece were selected but they do a good job of giving a sense of the intensity of the enterprise.

Hat tip to Nina Herbst at Chicago for putting this on line so that I could blog about it.

Doctoral fellowship at MDRC

This would be a lot of fun!

MDRC is one of the very best social science research organizations, with a primary focus on random assignment evaluations of social and educational programs.

4/15/11: Link fixed.

Joining the "Booth Nation"

An interesting piece on how admissions works for the MBA program at the Booth School at U of Chicago.

I like the bit about having the applicants come up with a four page powerpoint presentation with no guidance. Here is what the article has to say:

It was Ahlm who had the idea for this portion of the application. He jokingly says it came to him when he hit his head on the bathroom sink in his home. “This is an exercise that very much captures the essence of what Booth is about,” he says. “Having an ambiguous problem with many moving parts and being able to come up with a strong compelling solution. It was designed to allow someone to bring an application to life. The Powerpoint adds a lot of color, texture and depth to the application.

It also apparently turns some applicants off. “It leads some people to not hit send, which is a perfect outcome,” believes Kole. “Because if they are frustrated and feel they don’t know what to do with those four sheets of paper, they are not going to do well here. If that’s too much ambiguity for them, it’s good that they find that out before they apply. A lot of admits say they fell in love with the place through that process.”

I do wonder, as always, about whether all this effort would pass a cost-benefit test relative to a much less intensive, and extensive process, that used a few simple rules to mechanically rule most applicants in or out, and then had some human intervention only for marginal cases. I have never seen any evidence one way or the other, and I expect that the admissions experts, like most experts, think that they add more to the process than they do.

Oh, and associate dean Stacey Kole overlapped with me in the economics doctoral program at Chicago. I wondered where she ended up - not too far away it seems.

Mankiw on graduate education

Greg Mankiw's discussant comments from a paper presented at the ASSA meetings contain a lot of wisdom.

What I think many deans of gradual studies have trouble with is successfully explaining differences across fields in completion rates and time to degree. They see that economics has a lower completion rate than, say, history and they are puzzled. But they should not be puzzled. It is all about opportunity costs as well as, to some extent, differences in fields in the extent to which doctoral study represents consumption rather than investment in human capital.

I am inclined to like Greg's suggestion about MA programs. In Canada, it is the norm for students to do an MA before starting a doctoral program, and the better MA programs, like the ones at Queen's and UBC, manage to do a good job of serving two aims. First, they provide professional training to students who will stop with the MA and take jobs in the government or the private sector. Second, they provide a lot of information to students pondering whether or not to get a doctorate. Whether this information provision function, and the selection it induces, leads to measurably higher completion rates in Canadian economics doctoral programs would be interesting to study. A side benefit of doing an MA first is that the first year of the doctoral program is a bit less stressful. At least, the Canadians in my class at Chicago, who had already at least seen some of the first year material in their MA programs, seemed a bit less stressed out.

I can't write no ...

... dissertation.

I suspect all the local grad students have long since seen this but it was new to me.

A couple of colleagues of mine make very brief appearances in the video. Current students should remember that these sorts of things never really disappear - so make them good!

Hat tip: Ken Troske

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.

Who is "my student"?

The way that dissertation committees work is that one faculty member is the chair of the committee, and is joined by some number, usually two, of other faculty members. Sometimes, as at Michigan, there also has to be a committee member from outside of the student's department. Other times, as at some Canadian and European universities, there is some sort of external review process involving faculty from outside the university.

It is very clear that the chair of the dissertation committee can refer to the student as "my student". The complexity, and thus this post, arises in regard to the other faculty members on the committee. On the one hand, there is a concern that the chair might offended if one of the other faculty members referred to the student in question as "my student". On the other hand, a student might be offended (or at least dismayed) if a professor who was on his or her committee but was not the chair declines to refer to the student as "my student".

I usually only refer to students for whom I was the chair as "my student" and refer to other cases with language such as "I was on so-and-so's committee". Thus, at the risk of offending some students, and at the cost of awkward language, I avoid the possibility of offending my colleagues. But is this really the best way to proceed? I wonder. Indeed, I am not even that clear on the rules that other faculty members use, but have resolved to pay more attention to this in the future.

Appreciative thinking

This post implicitly contains some very good advice for graduate students about how to relate to the literature.

I see the post as making several points and hinting at others:

First, you can learn useful things about a paper and a literature not just by asking what is wrong but also by asking what is right. Or, even better, try to think about why the authors did what they did. Authors usually try to get things right. If it seems to you that they did not there may be a good and informative reason.

Second, it is very important to keep in mind that there are few perfect papers and, even more important, that it is not only perfect papers that make contributions. To use an example close to home, the LaLonde (1986) American Economic Review paper that is the first to use an experiment to provide a benchmark against which to evaluate non-experimental methods within the context of specific data sets and a specific program has many imperfections both conceptual and in execution. At the same time, it has spurred a very important literature both by raising important questions, by suggesting a useful strategy and by coming to a provocative conclusion.

Third, and this is more distantly related, your first paper as a graduate student is almost sure to be awful. Mine was and so were plenty of others I saw among my graduate school colleagues and, later in life, among graduate students. Instead of delaying the inevitable writing of the awful first paper by playing fanstasy baseball or overachieving as a teaching assistant, think about it like losing your virginity. That probably was not that much fun either, but it is a necessary condition for moving on to better things in the future!

Hat tip: marginal revolution

Junior job market

The junior job market in economics is gearing up for 2008-09. There has been a flood of practice job talks this past month at Michigan and I have started the process of writing the seven (!) letters for students on the job market that I have to write. Our placement meeting, at which the department faculty discuss and then rank the students into a set of categories is coming up fairly soon. It is the rankings from this meeting that determine what names get shared with employers who call us and ask who they should look at. A lot of the game is right here: on the demand side we basically do not look at anyone who is not recommended to us via the similar semi-orders constructed at other departments, unless there are very powerful back channel signals.

Here is a website where rumors (or even actual information) can be shared.

There was a similar (though less well laid out) site last year that I looked at a bit (and that some of our gradual students looked at a lot). I would caution students reading the site to watch out for deliberate misinformation and other nastiness. There was some of this last year in relation to a student of mine.

Odd behavior by gradual students

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.

Defending your thesis

Jim Sallee, soon to be employed at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, defended his thesis on Wednesday. I am on his committee and so got to give one last read to two of his three essays; I passed on the third as I have read it before and it is, in fact, already published. Jim's job market paper looks at the incidence of tax subsidies for the Toyota Prius. It, and the other two papers in the thesis, are quite nice indeed.

In the advice column, a reader of Jim's thesis would find the paper on the Prius tax subsidy incidence, a paper on age at marriage laws which is sort of a measurement paper and sort of a substance paper and an applied theory paper on the optimal design of university systems. While all three papers are excellent, we advised Jim to pursue a somewhat more focused agenda between now and tenure time. Knowing how much to focus is tough. You do not want to be the world's expert on some very minor subject but you also do not want to be seen as an unfocused wanderer through the academic desert. As usual, moderation in all things applies here as a specific case.

More generally, I was again impressed with the productivity of the Michigan graduate students.

Harris School tidbits: Irving made his money on Toni home hair styling products and First Alert fire alarms. Oddly, these fine products are not available for purchase at the school. Back in my graduate student days, Irving would periodically drop by and, sometimes, ask to have the school do some research for him. I got called in for one of those projects, which involved looking for people with "multiple barriers" in the NLSY-79.