Chad Jones
General Advice
for Graduate Students at Berkeley
Here are some tips for managing your graduate career. For the
tips on Field Exams and Oral Exams, you should take them seriously,
especially if I am one of the graders :-).
On Taking Field Exams:
Be specific!
Give specific citations to papers: e.g. Romer (1990, JPE).
Explain clearly what the contribution of the paper is.
Be aware of the research frontier, not just older papers: where
has the research in a particular area been going lately?
Include equations and graphs whenever possible. Be sure to
explain in detail your equations and graphs: what are the
variables, what is the interpretation, etc.?
Discuss specific regression equations and give details of key methods
of identification, key point estimates with confidence intervals,
potential problems with the approach, etc.
On Writing a Thesis:
Keep a journal of ideas: whenever you have a research idea, jot
it down. I still keep one of these (online as a web page) and
find it to be very helpful.
Reading papers when you are formulating a topic is important but
dangerous. DO NOT just casually read papers that are closely
related to your topic. The danger is that you will have a
half-baked idea, read a paper superficially, and decide your topic has
already been fully researched.
Instead, when you read a paper close to your topic, you must read it
thoroughly: take pencil and paper in hand, derive every equation
and theoretical result. Get the data the authors are using and
reproduce every empirical result. Researchers always want to make
their results looks as good as possible, so they tend to hide or shade
the big problems with their research. If you only read a paper
casually, you will miss these, but if you derive every result yourself,
the problems will jump out at you. I find this can sometimes be a
useful way to generate a topic: if you are struggling, pick a
couple of key papers related to your interests and read them this way.
Of course, remember that you do not want to write a paper that is "A
Small Variation on X's Work." However, sometimes you can find big
holes that others haven't seen by understanding X's work very well.
Reserve periods of time when you do not check email and do not browse
the web, no matter what. It is just you, a pen, and some paper. Force
yourself to think. Thinking is hard work and so it is easy to get
distracted. If you eliminate those distractions, you will have nothing
to do but think.
Finally, I personally like papers with the following structure:
Here is a stylized fact that everyone will accept as roughly
true. Here is something puzzling or interesting that one gets
from this fact. Here is a model that we can use to try to
understand that fact. Here is a simulation of the model that
reproduces the fact. This is a good outline for many (but of
course not all!) good macro papers.
On Taking the Oral Exam:
What is your main contribution to knowledge? What is the main
question you are trying to answer and how will you go about answering
it?
What other projects have you thought about? Please mention these,
at least to some extent: if we do not like what you are doing in
your main project for some reason, these may give us a starting point
for helping you go in another direction.
On the Job Market:
To be written...