This post summarizes the past two years of my PhD program.1 I describe my research and teaching experience, and offer some advice to other students.
Research
I worked at Motu before starting my PhD. My job was to write research papers. I had two supervisors—Dave Maré and Adam Jaffe—who guided me through the research process. I left Motu thinking research was easy and that I knew how to do it.
I thought wrong.
Dave and Adam made research easy by telling me what to work on. I didn’t have to come up with research questions. Instead, I answered theirs. I learned a lot along the way—especially about networks and writing publishable papers. But I didn’t learn how to ask my own questions. That’s where I (and many other PhD students) struggle. It’s hard to find questions that are interesting and important, and can only be answered by me.
I had some help from my classmate, Anirudh. We wrote our second-year papers on similar topics. Mine asked why experts give simple advice. Ani’s asked how people learn from coarse information. He had an empirical setting in mind: farmers learn from others’ outcomes (e.g., crop yields), which depend on conditions (e.g., fertilizers and soils used) that are not always observed.2 It sounded interesting and important. It also sounded like a question I could help answer theoretically. So we combined our ideas and started working together.
Ani and I have refined our ideas since. We’ve settled on a question that excites us: how do people use mechanistic knowledge to learn and make decisions? We’re answering that question in two papers, one theoretical and the other empirical. The theory and empirics support and motivate each other. Likewise Ani and I support and motivate each other. Working with him has been the highlight of my PhD.
One way Ani and I refined our ideas was by presenting them at seminars. We learned a lot from our audiences. They told us what they found interesting, what was novel, and what we needed to explain better. They prompted us to figure out some technical details and to clarify our key insights.
Most of our audiences’ comments were encouraging and useful. But some were discouraging and useless. During one of my presentations, a professor said they liked our question but not our model. (Another said they liked our model but not our question!) I asked how we could make our model better. They responded with “I don’t know” and yet “I’ve already published this in the QJE.”
The same professor told me to be less ambitious: to make technical contributions to well-known problems, rather than conceptual contributions to novel problems. They said I have “the rest of my career to work on big ideas.” Many PhD students follow that advice—especially students of economic theory. They feel pressured to show off their technical skills, using complicated math to explain shallow ideas. I would rather use simple math to explain deep ideas.
Teaching
Stanford pays PhD students to work as teaching assistants. I TA’d two finance courses: one aimed at freshman and another aimed at seniors. I don’t research finance but enjoy teaching it. I can share examples from my own life (e.g., as an investor and credit cardholder) to make the lecture material more concrete.
The best part of TAing was meeting my students. Few came to my sections or office hours, but the ones who did were curious and thoughtful. They asked interesting questions and engaged with my answers. Some questions were practical (e.g., “how do I build a credit score?"), some were topical (e.g., “why did Silicon Valley Bank collapse?"), some were about me (e.g., “what’s it like doing a PhD?"), and some were about them (e.g., “how do I make friends?"). I loved hearing my students’ stories, sharing my own, and becoming their mentor.
Most of my students were anxious about their grades.3 That surprised me. Stanford students have already proven themselves by becoming Stanford students. They’ll get great jobs at great companies who trust the university’s brand. Society already believes in them. Their lives will be fine regardless of their grades.
Besides, most of my students had better things to do than study. Some interned at banks or hedge funds; others worked for research labs or start-ups. All were ambitious and awesome. But their peers were ambitious and awesome too. So my students didn’t notice how impressive they were. I reminded them often. They would have been stars at my alma mater, where few had big dreams and fewer pursued them.
Advice
Find collaborators who “speak your language." Anirudh and I are math geeks with sociological bents. We understand how each other thinks and get excited by similar ideas. That makes our meetings more fruitful and fun.
Make time to reflect. I have a list of questions I ask myself every Sunday: What did I achieve this week? What did I struggle with? What made me proud? These and other questions prompt me to pay attention. As does sending newsletters to family and friends back home. I want them to know what I’m doing and where I’m going, which means I have to know too. So I take stock regularly. It punctuates my PhD and makes it seem like less of a grind.
If you’re studying abroad, try to live near an international airport. It’s much easier and cheaper to fly home if you can fly directly. It’s also easier for family and friends to visit. Mine flew via SFO on their way to other countries. Rather than hang out at LAX for a few hours, they could hang out with me for a few days.
Try to stay healthy, but don’t over-do it. I exercised too much, ate too little, and gave myself anemia. It made me anxious and apathetic. I had no energy to be social or do research. In short: life sucked. 0/10, would not recommend.
Remember that research is hard. You’re allowed to be bad it at. If you already knew how to do it well, then you wouldn’t need to do a PhD!
-
Hence this blog post. ↩︎
-
Adam Mastroianni has a great Substack post on grade anxiety. ↩︎