You as an Individual

1. Make sure you are here for the right reasons.

· You are here because you think, or at least strongly suspect, that the economic way of thinking is the right way for you to tackle issues and questions you care about. Don’t spend five years studying economics only to devote yourself to complaining about its assumptions, its methodologies, its abstractions, and its irrelevance to real world problems. There is a place for all those complaints, and a need for people to voice them. But you are not the person to do it. You will be unhappy doing it, frustrated and marginalized in your work. Be proactive. If you conclude during your first couple of years here that this is what you believe, move on. Find another subject that fits your needs better.

· You are here because you have your heart set on doing something with your life that needs a PhD in economics. Don’t do a PhD because you parents have one. Don’t do a PhD because simply because you got a good GPA as an undergraduate, so you must be smart. Don’t do a  PhD because you’d like to see the letters after your name -- the best PhDs never write the letters after the name. Don’t do a PhD because you’d like people to call you “doctor” -- the best ones don’t demand this. Instead, do a PhD because it is a means to a worthwhile end.

· You are here because you love learning and you think that you can do some learning here. If what you want to do requires a PhD, then what you want to do requires a lifelong commitment. If you don’t enjoy studying, learning, and grappling with difficult problems this year, then you won’t enjoy the life that the PhD brings. The past week I began working on a paper with a colleague in the department. We think we have an important idea, but we have no idea how to solve the problem. Two days ago, my colleague came in to my office all excited, because he had solved a tricky math problem that was essential to the paper. We decided that we had a brilliant paper in preparation. Yesterday, we sat down and discovered the next step, equally essential to the paper, was a lot harder, and may be impossible. At the moment we just don’t have any idea how to solve it. We will work on this problem for the next six months. After that, we may just have to drop it in the trash. But maybe, jut maybe, we’ll solve it. That is the nature of work as a PhD economist. So, if this year you find yourself getting frustrated trying to solve a homework problem, you must bear in mind that it doesn’t ever get any easier.

2. Don’t complain, be proactive and constructive.

· Some material is hard. Many of you had enjoyed an easy time as an undergraduate. You got good grades and you understood almost everything you were taught with little effort. The first year of the PhD is not the same as the fifth year of an undergraduate degree. There is a quantum leap in difficulty. You will not understand everything easily. And it is not automatically the teacher’s fault.

Be proactive: Make an appointment with the teacher; arrange a meeting with fellow students; go to the library and get another book on the same subject; search online for lecture notes on the topic (the different perspectives might provide the breakthrough).

Be constructive: Share any particularly useful notes with your fellow students. Tell the teacher why you were confused and let them have a copy of what you found to be helpful. Some of them will hate you for it, but that is their problem. The majority will be grateful, and you will have helped students that will come after you.

· Some material you learn is abstract. You will struggle, when learning some mathematical technique or econometric theory, to see where or how you might apply it. Don’t assume it is irrelevant: if it’s being taught, it’s being used.

Be proactive: Ask the teacher for journal articles that help you see the way the technique is used in practice. Search for your own examples.

Be constructive: Share these examples with fellow students and the teacher.

· Don’t just complain about our failings. We know you don’t have adequate office spaces, or places to meet, that the computers are old and the software sucks. We know that the field you course you absolutely had to take this semester is not offered this year. We don’t have enough faculty to offer field courses every year.

Be proactive: For example, if a field course is not being offered this year, see if there are enough students in your cohort who want to take it. Put the names together and petition to have the schedule changed. If there is software you would like installed, see if technology services has a license and arrange for its installation.

Be constructive: There are things you may not be satisfied that as a department we can do something about. For other things we face outside constraints. Find out what is feasible, and focus on them.

· Don’t do the bare minimum. What you learn in class is the minimum technical input required of you. If you graduate with a 4.0 GPA in all your classes, it will not make you a good economist. You will also be disappointed to discover that no employer will care a hoot about your GPA. Read beyond the required readings, learn some additional math. Stop reading novels – journal articles should be your bedtime reading. Being an economist is not something you do from 9 to 5. It is something you are.

You as a Group

George Stigler was once asked what he thought was the main difference between the top economics departments and those further down in the pecking order. The answer was simple: it is the students. In the top schools, students initiate brown bag lunch session to discuss research ideas; they set up regular reading groups; they get together to tackle problems they weren’t even assigned. In other departments, students didn’t do these things.

It is up to you to make these group activities happen. They do not happen by accident. Some of you as individuals need to decide they matter, initiate them, and manage them. You have the roots of this in the Economics Graduate Students' Association, which is worth building up.

In thinking about the role you can play in all this, you must remember that you are not in competition with each other. The more your colleagues learn, the more you will learn in turn. The better jobs your fellow students get, the better your career prospects are. Help them learn, and they will help you learn.

This can sometimes be difficult to do. Groups are heterogeneous. One of you will turn out to be the smartest in your cohort, and you will feel that you have more to offer the group than others do. For you, I have three pieces of advice:

· Don’t let anyone know you think this. You will have no friends.

· Even if you are the smartest student in the class, remember that when you go on the job market there will be several hundred people as smart as you, and dozens a lot smarter than you, applying for the same jobs.

· Use your evidently superior skills to excel. Learn more than you have to. Write a better dissertation than you have to.

The natural corollary is that some of you will feel that everyone else is smarter than you. For you I also have three pieces of advice.

· Have confidence. You will be able to find a niche that you can excel at. Begin searching for what that niche might be at an early stage. You will be a valuable contributor to the group.

· Seek help in your studies early and often. Don’t try and impress a teacher half way through the semester by pretending to understand things you don’t. Impress him or her by being honest, getting answers you need, and showing what you know at the end.

· Don’t let a lack of confidence defeat you. You will not get better by avoiding questions in class, or avoiding interactions with faculty, or blaming others for not doing a good enough job teaching you.

You and Faculty

Your understanding of how faculty and graduate students interact will be enhanced if you stay aware of the following: you are, by and large, a burden. Faculty are promoted and get salary raises primarily because of their research. Outside career opportunities depend only on their research. An hour with you is an hour away from doing the one thing that enhances their reputation, their paycheck, and their career prospects.

But this does not mean you must be an unwelcome burden. To the contrary, do things right, and you can make yourself very welcome. If you do what it takes to not be a burden, you will instead be an asset. We will be proud of you, and you will leave here with former advisors who are now friends and promoters of your career for the rest of your life.

The most successful relationships are lifetime relationships. This year, my wife and I spent a week on a fishing vacation with one of my former advisees and her husband. In Spring I am going to spend a weekend at my former advisor’s house – and we haven’t worked on a paper together in five years. But I also have former advisees with whom this lifetime relationship never got off the ground. It’s a shame, but I have no idea what they are up to. 

When it works, being an advisor is a lifetime commitment. When it doesn’t it is unpleasant for both sides. For this reason, the best advisors will usually be the most reticent about agreeing to be your advisor. They want to be sure that you are committed, before they themselves commit to the incredible tedium of reading 23 drafts of chapter 1 of your dissertation. You should remember that in the first place this was an idea they gave you, which means that even at the beginning it was too boring for the advisor to want to do. They want to know that you will come to meetings prepared, and that you will do your own thinking. They want to know that this won’t stop as soon as you leave FIU. In short, they want to know that they can be proud of you and willing to promote you to the profession for the rest of their working life, because that is what a good advisor does.

How do they get to know these things? At the beginning, you can provide the right signals. Make sure you know the professor’s papers before you approach him or her. Make sure you can say something substantive about why some of those papers interest you. Have some ideas about research topics. And above all, don’t be superficial about those things. If you communicate, by your actions or lack of them, that you don’t really have an interest in what your potential advisor has done, why should he or she have an interest in what you have not yet done?

A lifetime commitment should always involve a courtship. Meet a few times to discuss research ideas, find potential topics, and let the professor get to know you. Do all this before you take the next step. This is not a one-way street. Doing all these things allows you to discover whether your targeted advisor is really a self-centered ass before it is too late.

* * * * * *

A successful relationship between a student and advisor is an evolution. You will begin as a student. Your advisor’s job is to turn you into a colleague. This is also your job, and it should also be your aim. But it is not easy to do. At what point do you stop calling your advisor professor? At what point do you begin to disagree with what your advisor says? You will approach this transition with trepidation. But bear in mind, it is just as hard for your advisor.

How you approach this depends on your personality as well as your advisor’s, and there is no general advice to be given. I will say just one thing. By the time you graduate, your advisor may have read 30 drafts of your dissertation chapters, spent countless hours going over your problems with you, written letters, and made phone calls to help you get job interviews. Perhaps your advisor even got a grant and funded your studies. If, after all this, you have never by the time you graduate picked up a new paper your advisor has worked on and given him or her helpful comments and feedback, did you really turn yourself into a colleague?

Life After FIU

Finally a word to the ambitious researcher. At some point you will discover that most of our graduates who enter academia get jobs that are more teaching than research. You might begin to get discouraged and wonder whether all the work it takes to become a researcher is worth it. If you are ambitious, I can tell from personal experience that it is.

I do not have a PhD in economics, and I did not graduate from a top school. My first job was at a private teaching school. I spent two years there. It was a nice environment, but I knew I wanted to do research. The school did not value research, I had no colleagues to work with, and no time at the office to do anything but teach and advise students. I set myself a schedule, where I did my research from 9pm to 2am. Every day. I wrote and published some papers out of that effort. After two years I has hired by the University of Houston, where four years later I was tenured. From there I went as associate professor to Carnegie Mellon. I have given talks at Chicago, Harvard, and other top schools, with all expenses paid, I’ve had conference organizers fly me to Europe and pay my expenses to give talks there. I’ve spent an evening discussing research with a Nobel Laureate, which was one of the highlights, not just of my career, but of my life.

I say all this not to brag, because it is the normal activity of a reasonably successful researcher, but to convince you that if you are ambitious and hard-working all things are possible in this career.

Conclusions

I should add some final comments in closing. But I’ve really spent enough time away from my research, and I’ve got to go.

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