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There's a lot of heat on #econtwitter this week re advice for phd students. Let's set the snark aside for a minute.
Advice is helpful when:
1. It gives contextualized info that's actionable
2. It sheds light on assumptions students may not know
3. The goal of the advice is clear
Advice is helpful when:
1. It gives contextualized info that's actionable
2. It sheds light on assumptions students may not know
3. The goal of the advice is clear
I took @AnthonyLeeZhang's advice as mostly saying "work on writing multiple papers". This is useful advice bc it is counter to an often repeated refrain of "focus on your jmp from day 1 and nothing else; as soon as a paper is clearly not your jmp, drop it".
I agree with @AnthonyLeeZhang that the latter is bad advice. It's bad for many reasons, including being disparaging of ideas and research threads that are not "big enough", which I posit is fundamentally wrong on pedagogical basis for young, inexperienced academics.
Anthony makes the additional point that while the advice to focus on the jmp has strategic merit re getting an academic job, that merit is overstated. He makes a good argument that a higher-expected-value strategy is to take ideas in grad school and try to make them legit papers
Writing papers is no trivial thing of course. But the goal of the PhD is to learn how to write papers so that's not a good reason to ignore this advice. What went wrong with the thread is that it emphasized the "outputs" of having papers rather than the "input" of writing papers
So if you're an impressionable econ phd student trying to make sense of things. Try these takeaways:
1/4 Yes, you have to write papers to get a phd. A thesis is 3 typically. Writing a paper is the process of transforming an idea into shareable knowledge; learn how to do it.
1/4 Yes, you have to write papers to get a phd. A thesis is 3 typically. Writing a paper is the process of transforming an idea into shareable knowledge; learn how to do it.
2/4 There are opportunities to get guided experience writing papers throughout grad school. RA for profs to see pros work at it up close. Use course projs to try out ideas and talk to classmates/profs about them. Take your program's requirements srsly + use them to get feedback
3/4 Take your work seriously. If you're working on a project, ask yourself and your advisor what it would take to transform it into a paper. This doesn't mean you won't drop ideas - you will - but you need to get in the habit of expecting research to last beyond getting a grade
4/4 Treat the PhD as an apprenticeship, rather than a beauty contest. You're there to learn how to do research with lots of guidance. Part of that is learning how to choose projects, but a bigger part is learning what to do once you have one. Staring in the mirror doesn't help.
I realize this thread has become its own bastion of self important advice.
Hopefully the context is clearer. Tldr If you spend your phd learning how to write good research papers, you're likely to have a better research career; having evidence of that is helpful and worth doing
Hopefully the context is clearer. Tldr If you spend your phd learning how to write good research papers, you're likely to have a better research career; having evidence of that is helpful and worth doing