The GEEZ team interviewed nine former GEEZ presenters who were on the 2020-21 job market. They generously shared advice and thoughts on the job market for current GEEZ PhD students. You can learn more about their background at the bottom of the blog post.
This blog post is the second of a series of three blog posts. You can read the first blog post here. Everyone’s experiences are different but we hope the blog series helps you get ready for this new step in your career!
We asked our former GEEZ presenters: How did you make the subject of your job market paper (JMP) (in the economics of education) appealing to a general audience? We present their answers in three sub-categories: General advice for all job market candidates (JMCs), advice specific to JMCs in the economics of education and finally, some concrete examples.
Enjoy your reading!
Edited by Lina Anaya Beltran
1. General advice for all JMCs:
Your passion for your JMP and how well you sell its importance makes all the difference. – Danielle.
I think for any JMPs, to make the subject more appealing to the general crowd, you need to talk to as many people as possible: prepare the spiel, try it with others from different fields, adapt it, and try it again. When others' feedback is in conflict with each other, listen more to the experts from your field (& your advisors). – Xiaoyue.
My general advice about presenting anything specialized (a model, a measure of some outcome) is to spend time up front slowly walking through vocab and definitions. It may feel tedious, but it pays off in the form of avoiding clarifying questions later. I found this especially true for charts--people are never as quick at digesting them as you think. – Stephanie.
One thing to keep in mind is that to get an interview, and then a flyout, you really want to sell folks from your field on you. At the stage of the flyout, the whole department, more or less, needs to be on board, so the job talk is the place to make that broader pitch. – Christina.
If you are working on a very particular setup, it is really important to not lose sight of the forest for the trees. The details, at the end of the day, are not really important, but when we are close to our work, they seem important. It's much more useful to focus on the big picture and try to convey (over and over and over again) that your setup helps solve some general important question in education. – Andrei.
The key is how you sell yourself: In some interviews, employers may ask you to talk about your research while others may give you a topic for which you have to prepare a presentation. You have to prepare your interview depending on your audience. If your potential employer is a university or a think tank, be aware that some of the people in your interview may have no idea about your research topic or the evidence around that subject. The latter means that you will have to explain to your audience what your research topic is about? Why is it important? Why should we study that?
If instead you are given a topic to present during the interview: Think about your potential audience, who are they? Do they do research related to yours (probably not)? For example, l was asked to prepare a presentation in which I propose a research method evaluation for a policy question. My interview was for an econ department that also has people from business, management, etc. Some of the faculty focused on macroeconomics. They are probably not familiar with what a difference-in-differences is or an RDD. They may not know how those work. Make sure that you prepare your presentation to keep your audience connected throughout. If you are a JMC with a PhD in an econ-related field, keep in mind that econ departments may prefer someone from economics. How you sell yourself in the interview may make the difference between you and applicants with a PhD in economics. – Lina.
2. Advice specific to JMCs working on the economics of education:
I think those of us who study education have a natural advantage, in that everyone you'll talk to on the market has *lots* of experience with educational institutions, and so are often inherently interested based on their own experiences. – Stephanie.
Economics of education is a field that is obtaining more and more attention. Yet, you need to make your topic more appealing to people working in different areas in applied microeconomics, but also people working in completely different areas, such as theory or macro. I have two pieces of advice. 1. Make sure that you pitch your idea to be appealing to a broader audience (usually it is easy to relate to the concept of human capital and how human capital accumulation could be more effective). 2. Understand your audience. If you are speaking to policy or government people, you may need to focus more on the policy implication of your paper, without spending too much time on the technicality (for example, you won't need to argue under which condition you are estimating a causal effect). If you are speaking to an applied econometrics audience, on the contrary, you may want to focus more on the econometrics techniques and how you use them in your analysis. – Silvia.
In Econ of Ed, I generally don’t think it is too much of a stretch to do [a broad pitch for a general audience]— most of the audience, or at least the applied micro folks, will be comfortable with methods you present, and most topics in education lend themselves to thinking about welfare/policy consequences. – Christina.
I think that we, as education economists, are lucky. Our field is, I think, of general interest and it is easy to sell to a non-education crowd. On the other hand, I have (shockingly to me) heard the following feedback: "we already know this" or "this seems very obvious". People have very deep intuitions about education (we all went through a lot of schooling), so it becomes important to be able to broadly summarize the literature, what its limitations are and what fundamental question that remains unsolved you are shedding light on. – Andrei.
3. Some examples:
In the case of my JMP, I really emphasized the core underlying economics idea (asymmetric information), so folks from lots of different fields had an entry point into the discussion. – Christina.
My job market paper is about the differential impacts of California Discipline Reforms on discipline outcomes by race. I tailored my presentation to include a discussion on teacher-student racial match, which is called representation in public management. When answering audiences' questions, I also mentioned theories that public management and policy persons want to hear, such as policy implementations, street-level bureaucrats, and organizational performance. – Rui.
Actually I think I did not do a great job in promoting my JMP. Especially, when my JMP is a very China-specific topic. I guess the most important thing is to have a balance in talking about why your China topic is important and how it is connected to a broader picture. On the one hand, one of my professors really wanted me to connect to general literature and issues in the U.S. On the other hand, some other professors told me that the China topic is already important. – Zibin.
I think that I did not do a particularly good job with this on the market, despite rewriting my introduction/spiel 100 times. Another issue I had/am still having is that, given my JMP uses non-US data, a lot of people wonder, sometimes out loud: "why do we care about your context?" or "how is it applicable to the US?" or something about external validity. – Andrei.
To be honest, since my JMP was about something lots of economists and econ departments are thinking about (how to get more female majors) this wasn't something I had to work super hard to convince people was important. – Stephanie.
More about our interviewees:
Dr. Zibin Huang received his PhD from the University of Rochester and is an Assistant Professor at the College of Business, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
Dr. Silvia Griselda received her PhD at the University of Melbourne and is now Post-Doc researcher at AXA Research Lab on Gender Equality at Bocconi University.
Dr. Xiaoyue Shan received her PhD at the University of Zurich and is now a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Rui Wang received his PhD at American University and is now an Assistant Professor at Shanghai University of Economics and Finance.
Dr. Danielle Sandersone Edwards received her Ph.D. in Education Policy from Michigan State University. She is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
Dr. Andrei Munteanu received his PhD at McGill University and is now a postdoctoral researcher at USC and UWM. He will join the Université de Québec à Montréal in 2022.
Dr. Lina Anaya Beltran received her PhD at the University of Arkansas and is now a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bradford.
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