Spending a summer doing fieldwork in Busia, Kenya has become a rite of passage for Berkeley development RAs. When I was planning my trip, I wish there’d been a guide with the collected experience of former RAs all in one place—here’s my attempt at writing it. All information is current as of summer 2019.

Hello. I am a first-year PhD student in Economics at UC Berkeley, starting in 2018. I did my undergrad at Harvard College, graduating in 2016, and worked for two years at the New York Fed.