Pro-Tips: If You Have A Grad Student Home for the Holidays....

The Actual Moment: A Movie of the YYM Getting His Diploma...

Pretty fun.  The scene after....

EYM at NYU, PDQ!

The EYM has arrived and moved in to his dorm/apartment at NYU (He is starting the Politics PhD program...)  The view from his window is pretty fine, considering:

You can call me Al

There's an old joke, what do you call someone who graduated last in his class at Med School?.....Doctor!

Now we can add, what do you call someone who graduated in the middle of his PhD. class in Econ at Harvard 6 years ago?.......I don't know, but it's not Associate Professor.

Interesting short paper from Vanderbilt on class ranking and publishing productivity at top grad schools.

Here's the abstract:

We study the research productivity of top Ph.D. programs in economics. We find that class rank is as important as departmental rank as predictors of future research productivity. For example, the best graduate from UIUC or Toronto in a given year will have roughly the same number of American Economic Review (AER) equivalent publications at year six after graduation as the number three graduate from Berkeley, U. Penn or Yale. We also find that research productivity of graduates drops off very quickly with class rank at all departments. For example, even at Harvard, the median graduate has only 0.04 AER paper at year six, an untenurable record at almost any department. These results provide guidance on how much weight to give to place of graduation relative to class standing when hiring new assistant professors. They also suggest that even the top departments are not doing a very good job of training students to be successful research economists for any not in the top of their class.

That's right, the median Harvard Grad has 0.04 AER equivalent papers at tenure time! Ouch.

Do departments concentrate all their resources on the top few students?

Is the talent pool in economics very shallow and schools are taking students who shouldn't be there just to fill up their TA slots?

I think this post was mistitled

Yikes: Check out this professor's guide called "How not to write a PhD Thesis".

I would have to say it should be called "How not to be a thesis advisor"

Check out this gem:

I make my postgraduates pay for such statements. If they offer a generalisation such as “scholars of the online environment argue that democracy follows participation”, I demand that they find at least 30 separate references to verify their claim. 


I guess this professor subscribes to the "two wrongs make a right" theory of mentoring.

The other thought I had from reading the list was that I'm glad I work in economics and not literary theory!