Latin American students seem (internally) to feel really pressured to do a master’s and/or PhD abroad (e.g. US)
I feel attacked by this (and I’m only like 80% kidding).
I guess this is partially a by-product of not seeing many ways to gain legitimacy outside getting a postgraduate degree elsewhere. EA is somewhat different in the sense that people seem to weight academic degrees less heavily, but outside of EA this is more or less true: even if you come from a highly ranked university in Latin America, getting a job outside of it is quite hard, and most people will implicitly or explicitly discriminate against you.
In general, your observations seem especially helpful for the “Carreras con Impacto” initiative being run by the Spanish-speaking community. I think we could probably brainstorm ways to directly address these when advising undergraduates.
I would also give a big +1 to these observations:
Latin American students seem to have a hard time thinking ambitiously, probably more so than the “average EA”.
When these students come from low/middle income backgrounds then the issue seems to be that they are carrying a lot of “baggage” from their past that makes it hard for them to “think big” about the impact they can have in the future
If they come from more high income backgrounds then the issue seems to rather be imposter syndrome.
These are things we had to very explicitly address when working in community building in Chile, and I’m pretty sure other groups in Latin America have had similar problems. I think having good role models from the Spanish-speaking community have really helped ameliorate the lack of ambitiousness, but we still don’t have a clear-cut strategy for how to deal with it.
>even if you come from a highly ranked university in Latin America, getting a job outside of it is quite hard, and most people will implicitly or explicitly discriminate against you.
Anecdotally as US-native, I’ve been surprised with how detailed and impassioned my foreign-born econ professors (already highly accomplished and usually growing up privileged within their home country) could be about the history of US discrimination towards its own citizens. It felt like they were trying to convey the gravity of discrimination but could only do so using the most respectable sources they could find. One professor even talked about the famous paper about discrimination towards black-sounding names on resumes using the words “we had to fight for this”.
Thanks Agustín! Yes (as I told you in person) if anyone should feel attacked is me xD (I moved from Colombia to Germany to go to university right after high school.)
I think with that observation in particular (about the students wanting to study abroad) my main concern was that students might be putting too much weight onto the “legitimacy” factor vs. the “potential impact” factor and therefore making very costly decisions that (in some cases) might not be warranted. Having said that I can definitely imagine this (studying abroad) being the best decision for a lot of students.
I feel attacked by this (and I’m only like 80% kidding).
I guess this is partially a by-product of not seeing many ways to gain legitimacy outside getting a postgraduate degree elsewhere. EA is somewhat different in the sense that people seem to weight academic degrees less heavily, but outside of EA this is more or less true: even if you come from a highly ranked university in Latin America, getting a job outside of it is quite hard, and most people will implicitly or explicitly discriminate against you.
In general, your observations seem especially helpful for the “Carreras con Impacto” initiative being run by the Spanish-speaking community. I think we could probably brainstorm ways to directly address these when advising undergraduates.
I would also give a big +1 to these observations:
These are things we had to very explicitly address when working in community building in Chile, and I’m pretty sure other groups in Latin America have had similar problems. I think having good role models from the Spanish-speaking community have really helped ameliorate the lack of ambitiousness, but we still don’t have a clear-cut strategy for how to deal with it.
Thanks for this post!
>even if you come from a highly ranked university in Latin America, getting a job outside of it is quite hard, and most people will implicitly or explicitly discriminate against you.
Anecdotally as US-native, I’ve been surprised with how detailed and impassioned my foreign-born econ professors (already highly accomplished and usually growing up privileged within their home country) could be about the history of US discrimination towards its own citizens. It felt like they were trying to convey the gravity of discrimination but could only do so using the most respectable sources they could find. One professor even talked about the famous paper about discrimination towards black-sounding names on resumes using the words “we had to fight for this”.
Thanks Agustín! Yes (as I told you in person) if anyone should feel attacked is me xD (I moved from Colombia to Germany to go to university right after high school.)
I think with that observation in particular (about the students wanting to study abroad) my main concern was that students might be putting too much weight onto the “legitimacy” factor vs. the “potential impact” factor and therefore making very costly decisions that (in some cases) might not be warranted. Having said that I can definitely imagine this (studying abroad) being the best decision for a lot of students.