Preparing for grad school
- A guide to full-time research assistant positions (jobs now called “pre-docs”) as a stepping stone to quantitative social-science PhDs (Coly Elhai, Quan Le, Kai Matheson, and Carolyn Tsao)
- I’ve made notes from both my grad schools available on here in the past but Luke Stein’s put them to shame
Academic skill development
- How to critique academic work, helpful for referee reports and seminar discussion (Macartan Humphreys)
- How to build an economic model in your spare time (Hal Varian)
- Most academics taught themselves how to code. Some tips here (specific to R) on remedying bad habits (Jennifer Bryan and Jim Hester , esp. sections 2-3)
- The anatomy of an applied micro talk (Jesse Shapiro)
- A style guide for mathematical writing (Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts , esp. section 1)
Research
Transitioning from coursework to research (Paul Niehaus)
An alternative way to create structure is to focus on your system. By system, I mean the habits and routines you develop and practice on a regular basis. For example, attending the seminar each week, writing down three suggestions for ways to improve the paper, and meeting afterwards with a classmate to discuss your ideas is a practice you might incorporate into your system. In designing your system, your aim is to give yourself a high probability of eventually accomplishing your ultimate goal (come up with a great job market paper) even though you cannot predict with any certainty the sequence of events through which this will come about.
Finding research ideas, co-authoring, submitting papers, among other insights (Susan Athey, int. Simon Bowmaker, pp. 6-8)
My econometric theory was very similar. I’d be working on an empirical paper, and I’d say, “How can I think about the conditions under which this empirical approach would work?” And I would read papers with informal descriptions of the reasoning, and I would be dissatisfied. And so I would say, “Let me write this down, and if I do it formally, maybe then I’ll understand.” As I started writing things down, I would realize that there was a deeper, more general idea. And I felt that other people would benefit from having that clarity of conceptual insights in their own empirical work, and so I wrote it into econometric theory papers. Almost all of my very theoretical papers have been motivated by trying to solve an applied theory problem, and realizing that I would have more clarity about the specific problem if I understood the generality.