I’m wrapping up my first year in an economics PhD. As I enter the second year, I plan to take the sequences in development and energy/environmental economics. I would also like to include some trade/growth and econometrics courses.
Over the course of the first year, my views on the PhD have evolved in such a way that impacts my decision to continue in the program or leave with a Master’s. I am not quite sure how the additional ~5 years stacks up against the expected benefits.
I find a career in academia less appealing than before. I think the incentives for publication induce a lot of work that is orthogonal to the effort of generating high quality evidence. Further, the lifestyle of academia seems inconsistent with my desired family life and work-life balance.
I have more confidence in my ability to self study. I am amazed at how much I learned over the course of the year, and I have greater faith in my ability to work through challenging concepts. However, not all skills are amenable to self study. If I want to conduct more sophisticated research (I elaborate on this below), getting a PhD seems like the best option.
The subjective experience of grad school is worse than I expected. First, I miss (more than expected) having 5 days of work followed by 2 days off. I previously worked as a research assistant for a professor. Second, since we all take courses together in the first year, there is a strong sense of camaraderie in the cohort that I enjoy. However, I suspect that will fade as we pursue our own research. On the other hand, I will likely join a research lab, which might give me the sense of work community I desire.
I have a stronger desire to live on the West Coast than I expected. I would like to be closer to friends and family, and I feel greater cultural comfort on the West Coast. It seems like geographic preferences are difficult to manage in academia, especially if I have to coordinate with a partner.
I do think I should give the second year a chance, as I imagine it will be closer to representative of the rest of the experience. I will have the opportunity to learn more about frontier work and devote more time to research.
My Vision of a Career with a PhD
Previously, I saw myself as a development economist at an R1 university. Outside of academia, places like Evidence Action, J-PAL, or the World Bank, for example, seem appealing.
As for my research agenda, I am primarily interested in two lines of thinking.
I think that treatment externalities are everywhere, failing to account for such externalities can materially impact results, and that these two facts are underappreciated.
Agricultural productivity seems to be an important ingredient for economic growth. However, climate change threatens agricultural productivity in the developing world.
As to the first point, accounting for treatment externalities can be tricky; I see the value of getting a PhD in that effort. The Miguel and Kremer worms paper is a great example of this kind of thinking. Being at UChicago certainly helps in this effort, as I am hoping to start working at Kremer’s lab later this summer. As to the second point, the lab is starting to study questions in this area.
My Vision of a Career without a PhD
I would be most interested in a research role evaluating health and development initiatives. Organizations like GiveWell or GiveDirectly come to mind. Note, these are just salient examples, as a I have not done much digging. I think my research experience (in RCT evaluations and poverty measurement) would fit nicely with such work. I additionally have some limited management consulting experience that I’ve found useful in most work activities.
Alternatively, I could see myself in a more technical role, perhaps as a data scientist. In my previous job, I found myself gravitating towards and quite engaged when solving interesting computational problems. We did a lot of work with large datasets, and I enjoyed the associated optimization tasks, especially when using some form of numerical analysis. I also enjoyed my work with geospatial data; I assume this skill could be useful in climate or agricultural work.
Key Benefits to PhD
I’d be hesitant to leave the PhD for a couple reasons.
I have never had such a wealth of peers with common interests (both in development topics and the tools of economics/econometrics). I find this exciting, and I learn a lot from my peers. It’s also quite fun to be surrounded by this crowd.
If I want to focus on treatment spillovers and/or economic growth, I think the PhD would be crucial.
Getting a PhD is an act of building career capital, and it might be quite difficult to return to a PhD. Similarly, my opinions on academia could change, and completing the PhD doesn’t really close off the non-academic paths I mention above.
I will be attending a course on economic theory and global priorities, hosted by the Forethought Foundation, later this summer. Further, I plan to apply for 80K career coaching. I’m curious if anyone has thoughts on this decision, suggested resources, or is keen to discuss.
Congrats on passing your first year. Some off-the-cuff thoughts from someone still trying to get to where you are and spent a lot of thing on EconTwitter figuring stuff out:
I read online that 2nd econ phd year is usually the best year. Field courses I hear are a treat. If you’re not feeling that year, it’s unlikely the rest of the academic path will sustain your interest.
I think year 3 is where you can possibly have your first test bet, since it’s the first solo year. I also hear it’s the easiest to slack off in. A recurring joke I’ve seen among faculty tweets is “we still don’t know what our students do in their 3rd year, but we know it takes them a year”
I recall a Twitter poll that listed econ PhD year 1 as the highest work hours per week (compared to 2nd year, 3rd year, 4/5th year, job market year, tenure track, tenured). If the 5 days on 2 days off is what you miss, I suspect you’ll swing partly back towards that, which may help.
The wealth of peers with similar interests is a big reason why I’d considering PhDs. I do think you’ll have trouble finding that outside the PhD. That said, you’ll still have those connections and if EconTwitter doesn’t blow up, you can have that as kinda surrogate connection feeling.
I’d separate working on treatment spillovers and growth. Treatment spillovers feels like a measurement and impact evaluation thing, which does seem very academic-research-loaded. But growth is the outcome and working on growth can mean many things (which is one of my frustrations when people say we should work on economic growth. It as specific as saying you want to work on non-global-health systemic change).
In the real world, very few roles work on growth theory or policies for aggregate growth directly. It’s usually some piece, like infrastructure or corruption or business liberalization or so forth. Some might have a growth model as their motivation, but for most people the motivation is as simple as “this is a big problem with big upside, let’s work on it”. If that more growth-adjacent less-evaluation-rigor stuff appeals to you, the PhD is less crucial.
As an aside, to my knowledge, most trade econ doesn’t work on country-level growth directly or stuff relating to that. That seems to result from the history of trade methodology, where it’s very micro focused. There is stuff on firm productivity growth in the “new new trade theory” (look up Melitz) though it’s unclear how that aggregates up into broader welfare gains. I do know there’s a macro-trade / computable trade niche of stuff going on, but I’m less familiar with those, and that community feels like it’s closer to macro than trade.
Thanks for all the helpful thoughts. The distinction between the growth work and treatment spillovers is useful. Growth theory doesn’t seem to be a huge field these days, whereas program evaluation is quite large.