Research Tips

Sep 22, 2022

Here are some tips (mostly “life hacks”) with fairly broad applicability to research students. I’ve found that advice more often reflects the experiences of the giver than the needs of the receiver, so reading unpersonalized advice on the Internet can be very hit-or-miss. But, if you’re a Berkeley econ grad student, or interested in econ grad school in general, I’m happy to chat. DM me on Twitter or shoot me an email and we can set up a time.

First Year

• At the start of First Year, set up Zotero with Zotfile to manage citations automatically (Robert Karl has a great YouTube tutorial on how to do this). Getting the setup right may take an hour or two, but it will pay for itself in time twice or thrice over by third year. Every time you read a paper for class, or for your own interest, drop the PDF into a Zotero folder. Zotero can automatically generate the citation info, sort it into the right folder, and even rename the file based on a preset template—and it’ll all be there when you need to assemble a bibliography.

• Install MathPix Tools to copy equations from PDFs into LaTeX. It can even handle handwritten text through optical character recognition (OCR). In terms of time, this must have the highest returns of any tip I can give.

• Berkeley-specific: You can reserve a study carrel at Doe Library, where you can leave books and research materials. This is especially useful for the first year history paper, so you don’t have to lug a stack of books everywhere you go. Plus, they’ll put a sticker with your name on it, so it guarantees a quiet space where you can work.

• Berkeley dev students: If you’re going to the field for the summer, before you leave, make sure you get all Berkeley residency paperwork squared away. I have more info about this on my Busia tips page.

• Prioritize your mental health. Be kind to your classmates.

• Conditional on the previous point: if you find you have some spare time, try spending maybe an hour a month thinking actively about research. I personally did not manage this until my Second Year (I was worn out and tired as hell), so it’s okay if you don’t have the bandwidth. But since practically everyone grouses about the Hamiltonians/upper-hemicontinuous correspondences that are keeping them from “what they really want to be doing”, you can even think of research as a (small, mild-mannered) act of rebellion. If, by snatching twenty minutes here, fifteen minutes there, you can shoot a couple emails to get the ball rolling on some data requests, that’s a huge victory—even if they never reply. There are so many bureaucratic delays waiting for data access that frontloading some of it while you’re busy taking third derivatives is a huge efficiency gain. More broadly, the returns from even small amounts of time thinking about what research questions you’re interested in can compound into something quite large. But also don’t sweat it if you don’t have time. I certainly didn’t.

• Try to take every opportunity to do research for coursework seriously. At Berkeley, this is typically your first-year history paper; in second year, various referee reports and (if you’re lucky) a short prospectus. It’s tempting to view these grudgingly, as the last bits of homework in your life, the final descendants of the ketchup-stained worksheets you used to scribble on the kitchen table. But research opportunities are so rare during the first two years that it’s worth at least thinking about using these strategically. For the history paper, even if you’re a hard-core labor economist convinced you’ll never publish on history in your life, use it as an excuse to read about the deeper context behind the questions you are interested in. In the best case, you’ll have a paper you can staple to your dissertation; in the worst case, you’ll at least have learned something useful. For referee reports, maybe pick a paper that’ll stretch your technical skills, and force you to learn techniques that you’d be loath to in the absence of an assignment. (There’s often also room to negotiate with professors to pick a paper closer to your interests.)

• Remember that the best predictor of your First Year grades is whether or not you’ve seen the material before. Try not to extrapolate anything more from them than that.

Second Year

• Berkeley-specific: In my view, one of Berkeley’s “secret weapons” is the undergraduate mentorship program, where you can hire undergrad RAs in exchange for course credit and (crucially) mentorship. I’ve had great experiences with the RAs I’ve worked with, who have helped me digitize/clean historical data and do some preliminary data analysis. Having weekly meetings with your RAs is also a great way to force yourself into a regular schedule, and make steady progress on data-intensive projects.

• Berkeley-specific: If you’re interested in economic history, and you feel like the existing course options don’t cover areas you’re interested in, it’s possible to set up a reading course in your second year with a professor. I did one on East Asian economic development with Brad DeLong and Barry Eichengreen, and it was a fascinating experience that set up a lot of my later research. In retrospect, it’s an amazing blessing to have more faculty than students in a room, studying whatever it is the student finds interesting.

Third Year

• Berkeley-specific: The “end product” of Third Year is your orals presentation, where you present in-progress work (that, inshallah, may become your JMP) to a group of four faculty members. A common expectation among orals chairs is that you turn in a 25 page paper with your presentation–something I was unaware of until a month before it was due. So, you know, plan for that.

• At this point you may start applying for grants. One thing I learned the hard way is that the deadline on the box is not necessarily the real deadline. You usually need to have grant applications ready a week or two before the official deadline. At Berkeley, most external grants need to go through the Sponsored Projects Office (SPO), an organization designed to make your life easier by giving you lots of paperwork and claiming a large chunk of your grant money. Initial proposals to SPO sometimes needs to be submitted as early as several weeks in advance. Even internal grants may also need to submitted early, especially if your recommendation letter writers would like to see the proposal.

• I’m really starting to veer out of the bounds of “simple tips”, but to hell with it, we’re going off-road. In my view, the main purpose of Third Year is not to land on a killer job market idea (though kudos to you if you do), but to learn how to structure your research practice. I mean this in the most nuts-and-bolts, quotidian, what-do-I-do-in-the-morning-after-brushing-my-teeth sense. The PhD cannot be you sitting alone Gollum-like in a cave, only to emerge miraculously with job market paper in hand after three years. You need regular contact with other human beings, people who will critique your work but also offer understanding and encouragement. More than any abstract notion of innovation or academic glory (which sure seem awfully flimsy after another fluorescent-lit night spent debugging code), it is these human interactions that are the fuel of research. For some, this comes from your academic advisor. For me, it was my weekly research meetings with my co-authors and undergraduate RAs—I just really don’t want to let my friends down, or to waste the time of my mentees. Whatever method you choose, the keys are that the meetings are regular, that they are supportive, and that they motivate you (not frighten you) into getting things done.

• Learn to fail quickly. With empirical projects, there’s usually some uncomfortable fact that you’d like to forget about because it could kill your project. Perhaps you’re not sure if a variable you need exists in a dataset. Or perhaps there’s a simple regression (or even a summary statistics table) with publicly available data that would strongly suggest the story you’re interested in isn’t true. For me, every instinct of self-preservation in my body pushes me to ignore this fact until the last minute. Don’t be like me. The sooner you learn a project isn’t viable the better—rip that band-aid off. In the worst case, you can kill the project and move on to more rewarding things. But, more likely, you’ll figure out a way to reconfigure the project and repurpose the work you’ve already done—and you’ll thank yourself for learning this sooner rather than later.

• Third year is a good time to take a class outside of Econ. The end of formal coursework means you suddenly have a lot of unstructured time, and it’s good to have an incentive to bring yourself to campus (especially if you don’t have teaching responsibilities). One of the blessings of being a grad student is getting to take classes that you missed out on undergrad—tuition-free. Do something fun! Take drawing. Pottery. Photography. Tennis. Egyptology. Philosophy. Theology. Film. After the wringer of the last two years it’s helpful to remind yourself that you are not just a machine for churning out problem sets, but a living, breathing human being—vast, multitudinal, full of contradictions. I did not do this (my third year was at the height of COVID) but wish I had—writing this in my fifth year, I’m currently taking a short fiction workshop. It is sheer joy.

On Self-Efficacy. I’ve previously stayed away from giving advice about life and work as an Economics PhD, in part because I don’t think there’s a whole lot new I can add—who am I to give advice? But recently I’ve been reflecting on what I’ll call (in a half-remembered muddle of political science and pop psychology) self-efficacy: the feeling that you can solve the problem in front of you, if you just set your mind to it.

If you wanted to design a system to undermine your sense of self-efficacy, you couldn’t do much better than academic research. The positive rewards are few and far between, and, crucially, there isn’t a clear relationship between effort and outcomes. You can spend months painstakingly cleaning and building a dataset, only to find a pile of statistical mush. Worse, you could spend years working on a paper, only to have Professor Bigshot publish the same idea a week before submission. For every rare rush of discovery, there are countless lonely nights deep in the dim bowels of Evans Hall.

One helpful tip is to find a hobby that reinforces your sense that if you set your mind on something, you can do it. It almost goes without saying, but it’s really important to remember that you are not your work. Dedicating a portion of time every week to something that isn’t research reminds you of this. I think, unconsciously or not, this is something that most graduate students eventually figure out. Among my friends in my department, there are bakers, chefs, painters, sailers, climbers, skiers, runners, musicians, cyclists, gamers, gymnasts, and lifters. (And some contained in the same person.) For me, painting, writing, and (occasionally) tennis have helped keep me sane.

Fourth Year

• Presentations are enormously valuable for me—not for feedback (though that is helpful), but as a commitment device to actually, you know, do my job. As it turns out, my fear of public embarassment is far stronger than my intellectual curiosity, at least when it comes to getting work done. During the fall of my Fourth Year, I signed up for three presentation slots, which ultimately felt like too many. One would have been too few. Two I think is a good number to aim for: one at the middle of the semester, and one at the end. I made the mistake of pushing all of my presentations to the end of the semester, which reduced their value as commitment devices. Still, without exaggeration, around 70% of my research output this semester was created in the two weeks leading up to my presentations.

• At this point chatter about job market stuff really begins in earnest. This is probably why Fourth Year feels less fun than Third, although substantively you are doing the same things. Do your best to tune this out. Focus on the work, not the paraphernalia.

Fifth Year

If you get a dog, make sure to keep the beautiful Congolese tapestry that you brought all the way back from fieldwork in Kenya out of reach, just in case she gets the idea in the middle of the night to eat a corner and throw up all over the house.

Sixth Year… and Beyond

I’ll let you know when I get there.

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