My take on this answer basically comes down to what my mom told me is "making conversation," but it matters more when you have exactly one hour with someone important.

1. Introduce yourself with some interesting things and say a bit about what you study. The big shots meet a lot of people- make yourself unique, confident and engaged.

2. Be excited about what you study or plan to study, even if you're still early in your research or not sure what your topic will be. Say something brief that you're passionate about exploring (migration and domestic work?) or mention a really cool research question (what is the impact of remittances on school choices?). Step 1 and 2 are really important if the big shot meeting is over lunch. She needs time to eat.

3. Ask for advice. That's basically why your advisor sets up these lunch opportunities for you. The person you are lunching with is a big shot and she is taking time to speak to you. Run your research ideas by her and see what she thinks. Ask for paper recommendations (top three favorite fertility papers?), fieldwork suggestions, good conferences and other folks to talk to on your subject.

4. If introductions, research topics and advice don't generate enough conversation, ask questions. These should be specific, but not overly technical, questions (in the talk you gave this morning, why did you decide to use that instrument? Is it fairly well established in the labor literature?) Also ask questions about the direction of research in your field. Don't make the guest have to create conversation about the weather.

5. It's OK to play the name game. You went to undergrad with her former advisee and softball teammate? Sure. Everybody loves this person? Great, start the conversation with an awesome person you both appreciate. I do this all the time. The academic world is small and this is bound to happen anyway.

Valuable lessons on how to be an academic that aren't on the syllabus... or taught anywhere.

Scenario 1: Don't expect good feedback if you don't plan to give any. I've seen this happen plenty of times. It's not a crime to leave early or skip all other presentations, but it certainly doesn't make you a generous scholar.

Scenario 2: The Peacock. This one really grosses me out.

Student B: looks agitated throughout the student’s reading, and can barely sit through the next two papers. His hand shoots up during the Q&A session [or, in economics, well before]. 'Yes, this isn’t a question, but rather a comment, for the first reader–I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name. [doesn't bother to check program or wait for the student to tell him her name] But in listening to your essay, I wondered if you had considered... read... knew that X wrote an article on the subject in Very Important Journal……realized that your point has already been made by these 5 other Important People'...We should carry peacock feathers to wave around when this happens, so people can have a visual cue that they’re engaging in the vain behaviors of the peacock, grandstanding away, parading their knowledge for the world to see.

So, I agree that peacock feather grandstanding should be called out and reduced. It happens a lot (especially in economics?) and its gross. I don't go to great lengths to not embarrass people, however. If  someone hasn't read a crucial paper in their field that is extremely relevant to this paper, I would let them know without hesitation. I'm not gonna avoid corrective comments completely, but I'll employ the normal-person manners that my parents taught me. But likewise, I don't expect others to go particularly soft on me.

But concern for sensitivity aside, during a presentation, we should be contributing constructive comments, not insulting one another or promoting our own agenda. And having presented to sociologists, historians and political scientists, I find that economists tend to be harsher than folks in other fields. I think this is partly because we interrupt each other. While I actually prefer interruptions as opposed to holding questions all the way until the end, we really do need to keep our grandstanding in check. Sit on your plumage and have some manners.

It's actually like running a small business.

Here's why:

1. Income. I have applied to at least 16 sources of funding (and counting). That's 16 proposals, 16 budgets (because each grant/fellowship wants their own budget) and <16 sources of income (can't win 'em all).  I finally made a separate bank account for research monies, but that was a year into fieldwork. Why didn't anyone tell me to do that earlier?

2. Labor. I have employees in Tanzania and am occasionally surprised to find that I am the boss there. I'm thankful that I have actual professional work experience, decent leadership skills and excellent communication (for an academic, obviously).

3. Capital. That aforementioned research bank account that I finally opened? It includes reimbursed ATM fees (even internationally!), cheap international financial transfers and a personal banker that I can easily call up when I need another transfer to Tanzania (like, today). This type of fancy bank stuff does not come free to a graduate student with little capital, the account is co-signed by my dad.

4. I market my brand. I have a website.  I put some actual thought into the design and modeled it after doing some market research. Thanks, friends. In addition to getting valuable feedback from peers, the main point of going to conferences and giving talks in other departments is to market myself and my research.

5. I make my own schedule. My daily dissertation progress, or lack there of, is a cost or benefit that only I bear. Sometimes distracting and lucrative consulting opportunities fall into my lap. Sometimes its 72 degrees outside. Sometimes I stay in Tanzania way longer than I'd like. Often times, I work on weekends. No one is responsible for managing my time and risk, except me.

6. Zero personal life boundary. Why do my university and personal emails go to the same inbox? Because it would be too difficult to differentiate which emails are related to work/school and which emails are personal. My coauthors are my friends, I meet with students at 9pm, beer is often consumed over reviewer comments, I keep a change of clothes in my cubicle, my home bookshelf is dominated by textbooks and I live part-time in a researcher flop house.**

7. It's an unpredictable crap shoot. Sometimes I wake up at 4am and I have four emails from my employee (i.e. field assistant) that say we miscalculated some costs and I need to send cash, stat. Thus the value of #2.


**Based on this description, it is safe to say that I am single and child-less. I hope that this boundary might get a little thicker when I  a) am no longer a student and b) no longer single or child-less.

I'm doing a presentation on balancing professional and personal lives in academia next week for my Teaching in Higher Ed class. The title of this post is sarcastic; don't get your hopes up.

1. Who earns more: a tenured professor or a fry cook?

I’m a tenured professor of history of science and mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. I finished high school 25 years ago. What if instead of attending college I had worked at McDonald’s?

2. How to be realistic about the pre-tenure life.

I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.

3. And why am I such a pessimist about job market prospects and getting tenure? Because academia acts as a drug cartel.

Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of ‘outsiders’ ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail.

Hat tips: Students of GRAD8101

Last week, I had a labral repair surgery in my hip. It was not hugely invasive: an hour and a half of arthroscopic repair under general anesthesia, three weeks of crutches and two months of physical therapy. Most importantly for me, it is nowhere near as painful as an ACL repair.

Check out those numbers above. Four hours of time at a surgery outpatient center, two of which were in recovery, cost $16,582. Seriously? This doesn't include pre or post-operative appointments or any physical therapy.

My insurance only paid 35% of that price tag. HealthPartners negotiated that price for "bringing" patients like me to the surgery center. So, what is the point of the 16k, then? I highly doubt any uninsured person would have this semi-elective surgery (not recommended for folks with arthritis and not totally necessary for folks aren't "active"). Also, my Mom brought me to the surgery.

Also take note of that relieving 0 next to member responsibility. I guess the university makes up for its meager graduate assistant stipend with a fairly generous health plan.

Hat tip: HVM

Remember my grumbling post about the major lack of participation among women in my economics courses? And how I brought this up in the context of women's leadership and Sandberg's Lean In?

It turns out I'm not the only one who sees this association (i.e. told ya so). Harvard Business School underwent a self-imposed gender makeover, adjusting curriculum, social rules and rituals and trying to change institutional norms. Part of this: hand-raising lessons.

Nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 2011, Neda Navab sat in a class participation workshop, incredulous. The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Ms. Navab had been the president of her class at Columbia, advised chief executives as a McKinsey & Company consultant and trained women as entrepreneurs in Rwanda. Yet now that she had arrived at the business school at age 25, she was being taught how to raise her hand.

A second-year student, a former member of the military, stood in the front of the classroom issuing commands: Reach up assertively! No apologetic little half-waves! Ms. Navab exchanged amused glances with new friends.

There is certainly a persistent difference in how men and women participate in class (a friend of mine said that in his male-dominated department, men do not actually raise their hand- they simply start talking).  The fact that this difference exists for ambitious twenty-something professional and graduate students is indicative of a larger socialization training on appropriate behavior for boys and girls. It might be hard to overturn by the time these students reach grad school, but I admire Harvard for taking on the challenge.

Also notable from the in-depth article: there was a fair amount of push-back from the students who did not particularly appreciate being subject to the incessant gender lens.  If you're happy to believe that there aren't any problems to fix, consider this:

At an extracurricular presentation the year before, a female student asked William Boyce, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital firm, for advice for women who wanted to go into his field. “Don’t,” he laughed, according to several students present.  Male partners did not want them there, he continued, and he was doing them a favor by warning them.

My fantastic field assistant and his wife had their first baby two months after the start of the (year-long) intervention. I'm proud that we both work for an organization that gave him paternity leave. Now, four months after the start of the intervention, he has a bad case of malaria.

I'm worried about the size of the detectable effect on outcome variables, but health and babies are more important. Too bad good health doesn't get you three stars on a regression output table.

As an avid reader and follower of Chris Blattman’s blog (as in, I started this blog because his is awesome), I feel compelled to respond to his post discouraging field experiments. The post is no surprise; the fieldwork and experimental surge may now have a negative slope and when Blattman visited my department in the fall, he advised a group of us to buff up our theory and avoid collecting our own data.  It also may be no surprise that I’m defending fieldwork; I’m halfway through five months in Tanzania.  Top seven reasons to reconsider:

7. You will know your data extremely well if you collect it yourself. Far better than using a set of overly-analyzed public data, where you don’t know who collected it and if she counts Acacia thorns as “protection” when she codes “protected well” as the source of drinking water.

6. It builds character. I am realizing that a strong character is not necessarily a prerequisite for a career in academia and not related publication ability. However, I find that having told off a group of drunk heckling men in Swahili makes answering tough econometric questions during a lecture of students my own age, in English, a relative breeze. 

5. Because you gain a fuller contextual picture and experience the local culture, you learn things you never expected. This is particularly useful for new research ideas and hypotheses. For example, when I conducted focus groups, which I imagined were only for narrowing down my household survey questions, I discovered a completely different variable that was affecting family size. Bride price. It’s in the works now, but big ideas and a possible dissertation chapter are stewing.  All I had to do was ask.

4. It is a LOT of fun. Far more fun that working in a window-less office without interacting with a single other human being.  Fun is clearly another non-requisite for academia. And I am finding that I may be in the minority of academics, and academic economists in particular, who likes working with people. I enjoy things like getting stuck in a rural river during a lightening storm and pretending to get sexual jokes during a Swahili condom demonstration.  Honestly, the first two years of my PhD were miserable. Preliminary exams and coursework in economic theory are NOT fun.  An adventure in Tanzania collecting data is good for the soul after a humbling month of 80 hour/week study sessions and a micro theory preliminary exam. This is clearly an impractical reason to do fieldwork, but this leads me to the fact that…

3. Frankly, getting a PhD is impractical.  Evidence here, here and here. Don’t do it unless you’re completely confident that it’s the right life choice. But if you are that confident, you’re probably impractical. So go have fun.

2. Economics is a SOCIAL science.  There is so much to learn about people in economic development. We should learn language, culture, institutions (all the rage), social norms, gender roles, education structure, financial system, and infrastructure for the full contextual picture. If you write about people and haven’t spoken much to the people you write about, to hear their point of view, how social is that science? I am a little skeptical of that sort of seemingly removed expertise in economic development. It’s a cliché, but it seems inappropriate and arrogant to sit high in the ivory tower in North America giving advice about people in poverty if you haven’t actually interacted with people in poverty.

1. Chris Blattman recommended it... six years ago. Well, given that I’m responding to his post in the first place, I should definitely get this right. He did not strictly recommend fieldwork; in fact he cautioned against big long-term field projects and encourages good field preparation and minimizing risk.  But in the post that reminds me that I won’t lose my soul in grad school, he wrote “How to get a PhD *and* save the world:”

3. Take chances…Where I think [my committee] were wrong is that they told me to abandon my plans for risky and expensive fieldwork. They favored the less risky route that could get me to a completed dissertation faster. My chair’s response: “Hey, if you really want to do this, why not? Give it a shot. If it doesn’t pan out after three months, then come back and work on something else. Worst case scenario: you lose a few thousand dollars and a summer, but you have a great experience.” I plan to give the same advice to my students.

I’m sure all the risk-management conditions still apply, despite the fact that this recommendation was six years ago. But, in the most polite and respectful manner possible, I’d like to point out that timing matters for this sort of advice. I’m still a single twenty-something graduate student with a fierce grip on my ideals and sense of adventure. Blattman wrote the initial post when he was either a post-doc or still a grad student. With all due respect (which is a lot), he has since become 1) a professor and 2) a father.  These two facts and his experience makes him a bajillion times more qualified to give informed advice than this inexperienced blogger.

And I might tame my impractical advice as well if I ever grow up. But in the meantime, I’m still thinking about how to get a PhD *and* save the world.

Hat tips: LZ, BLK

I have discovered that my favorite part of writing my prospectus (oral preliminary defense on January 24!) is the literature review. Easily. It's also a little like planning a vacation on the internet.

I start with a reliable favorite, Ashraf, Field and Lee paper, which evaluates a family planning program in Zambia. This is basically like Vacation Rentals by Owner.  I get really excited about three or four other published papers on population policy from their literature review, which is of course equivalent to the three or four rental vacation houses in Wisconsin. But then something about the mere notion of desired fertility Pritchett's PDR paper, which I traced from Ashraf's lit review, calls into question the idea of family planning programs altogether and then I'm reading about the intellectual history of economic development and epistemology of the word need. Meanwhile, VRBO and the month of January have together inspired the cross-country skier in my Minnesota blood and then I'm looking at the qualifications for signing up for the Berkie. Meanwhile, Melinda Gates' TED talk is playing in the background, I've downloaded two papers on microcredit marketing experiments and I'm reading unpublished ideas on job market websites of up-and-coming economic demographers.

I can't wait to write a whole dissertation (read: plan my trip to Kilimanjaro).