EclectEcon

Gabriel Mihalache is about to embark on a graduate school adventure in North America, and he became concerned after reading this advice to incoming economics grad students. Here are some edited comments I have provided for him (and others):

1. Some schools (but not all) have profs who seem to think it is some measure of their masculinity to fail students and be tough on them. If you have selected one of those schools imbued with testosterone poisoning, and you find that out ex post, you have little choice but to suck it up and tough it out (or drop out). Usually there are cooler, more rational folks around who won’t let them fail everyone they teach just to prove how tough, smart, and rigorous they are.

2. Get the old exams! Study from the old exams! For some courses, I could not for the life of me figure out why so many of my classmates were getting such high grades. Then they told me about the old exams that had been floating around. Many/most profs use variants of the same types of questions, even if they don't ask exactly the same questions, and studying from the old exams is great preparation for those courses.

3. Study groups! I had some dynamite study partners in grad school. We complemented each other beautifully, and we all gained from it.

4. Read all the papers the prof has written on the topic of the course, even if the papers are not on the course reading list. Egomaniacs that they/we are, they/we teach from these papers and ask about them on exams. If the prof has written tonnes of stuff on that topic, at least try to read the abstracts, introductions, and conclusions (and any published comments/debates!)

I once had a prof who was lecturing almost exclusively from his own papers. When I asked him about it, he replied in shock, “Why are you reading those papers? They’re not on the reading list.” I guess he had never had a student do more than the minimum. I had read them during the break before his course began, just to get ready for the course.

5. Don’t give up on a subject. I had one course in which the prof (citing a book review in the old AER) pointed out that in one place the number of equations didn’t equal the number of unknowns. After the course was over, I felt uneasy about that particular material, so I went through my text to make sure I understood what he had been teaching. No matter how hard I worked on the math, I couldn’t see an error in the text, so I went to see him about it. It turned out the math had been edited in the second printing of the text (which I was using, but he still had the first printing). My doing this showed him I was a serious scholar, and in the process I learned some more.

6. Being buddies with profs is not a bad thing, but do NOT expect it to help with grades, reference letters, etc. Performance matters.

I realize you have a sense of foreboding when you read a piece like the one to which you linked. Let me assure you that it is mostly correct. Life in graduate school can be unpleasant. One particularly bad year (bad admission decisions, bad profs) many years ago, we had nearly a third of our first year class drop out. Given the environment that existed then, I didn’t blame them.

But most schools have fixed these problems and try to fix them quickly when they are discovered.

Nevertheless, much of grad school is a test of your desire and stamina. Learn from it, because once you become an assistant professor it’s just more of the same. If you throw yourself into it and really get a kick out of learning new stuff, you'll be well-prepared for the future. It might even be fun.

Addendum: Mike Moffatt has more here.