Alvin Christian
@_AlvinChristian
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econ phd student @umichecon, @fordschool. (linear) models and bottles.
Ann Arbor, MI
Joined January 2014
1/6. I've somehow made it 1 year through my pre-doc position without getting fired. To celebrate, I'll share a little write-up I made for those just starting. Recent grads and #EconTwitter might find it helpful. This is based on my specific experience.
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academic job market so bad you have a better chance of becoming the president of Mexico than landing a tenure track job.
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In case any non-economist doesn't understand the picture or math: this is how we decide whether the interest rate should be 2.2% or 2.3% and whether we should have 200,000 homeless people this year or only 2,000.
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My ex doesn't have social media, so sometimes I read through her CV and paper abstracts when I miss her.
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@fredzannarbor @Kaepernick7 @CoachJim4UM With a hard work ethic Inshallah the U of M will return to its glory days.
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Me when the seminar speaker accidentally says "caused" instead of "is associated with" when describing a non-causal correlation
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Too excited about this bachelor party itinerary I made in LaTeX
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How do you become a professor at a business school? I would like to wear a Tom Ford suit to work and teach 25 yr olds how to add fractions.
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Running that first regression and seeing null results after waiting six months for data
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To seem more approachable, I recommend that the economics profession stop using Greek letters and instead use emojis. BORING AND BAD:. Y = α + βΧ + φZ + ε. FUN AND FLIRTY:. Y = 🤠 + 🥰X + 😈Z + 👀.
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God gives his toughest battles to his least competent grad students.
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🚨🚨 NEW WORKING PAPER ALERT🚨🚨. Read about women lowering their standards when dating.
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My dream econ PhD applicant.- Harvard/Yale/Princeton undergrad.- 800 GRE quant score .- rec letter from Raj Chetty, Daron Acemoglu, and Adam Smith.- completed math PhD coursework.- 2-3 top 5 publications and 10+ works in progress.- 6ft.
My dream bf.- 6ft.- $300-500K total comp.- very ambitious & driven.- 27-33yo.- brown eyes.- loves nyc.- rlly funny but a bit weird.- rlly kind & has a moral system.- not trust fund baby (self made).- good taste.- good listener & planner.- loves running & reading.- loves me a LOT.
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My friends when I ask them "but what's the counterfactual?" in a normal conversation
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Me showing my advisor the graph I spent 20 hrs making when I should have been writing
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I'm too smart to fall for a scam. - phd student on the academic job market.
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Kamala Harris says she will bring back Two-Way Fixed Effects, if elected.
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This looks like another important paper on schooling during the pandemic. The authors find that in-person schooling was associated with MORE teen suicides. I have something to read on my flight now.
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A woman I went on two dates with included me in her dissertation acknowledgements 🥹.
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me in 2046 reading a DDDDDD paper showing how poor air quality in NYC today led to 0.0003 SD decline in test scores and $27 decline in lifetime earnings
New photo of the World Trade Center in New York City from EarthCam. New York City was ranked as the city with the world’s worst air quality yesterday due to Canadian wildfires.
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Oh, you liked the diagrams in my beamer presentation? Thanks. I made them in PowerPoint, took a screenshot, and then inserted them as a picture into beamer.
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when grandma asks you why you don't have a girlfriend
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My research interests lie in the intersection of "publishable" and "I want a job".
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1/N. I wrote a memo on the econ PhD application process based on my experience last year. I think prospective applicants - especially those outside of top schools - will find it useful. I only saw this from the supply side, so feel free to correct me!.
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WITHOUT GOOGLING.Name a famous historic battle.
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Grad school is telling yourself, "this week sucked, next week has to be better" every week until you graduate.
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All the research ideas I come up with were written by my advisor 20 years ago or someone with Norwegian data yesterday
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🚨🚨 FIRST CORONAVIRUS ECON PAPER ALERT 🚨🚨. Here's how economists' productivity has changed since the pandemic. (please appreciate my sense of humor @SHamiltonian and @causalinf)
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sociology is gossip with descriptive statistics.
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"My research interests lie at the intersection of macro and labor. I try to use big data and economic theory to answer foundational questions about human behavior. "
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Just gave a girl a forehead kiss on a first date. Someone please kill me.
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economics is like taking dating advice from your friend who has never talked to a woman.
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I love hanging with my HS friends because they remind me that being bad at grad school doesn't make me a failure or loser. I'm a loser because of who I am as a person.
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For anyone who thinks academics don't have a sense of humor, know that I applied to a Pre-Doc position at UChicago with this cover letter. and was rejected in a record 3 hours.
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Citations in 2022:. Wooldridge, 2021a.Wooldridge, 2021b.Wooldridge, 2021c.Wooldridge, 2021d.Wooldridge, 2021e.Wooldridge, 2021f.Wooldridge, 2021g.Wooldridge, 2021h.Wooldridge, 2021i.Wooldridge, 2021j.Wooldridge, 2021k.Wooldridge, 2021l.Wooldridge, 2021m.Wooldridge, 2021n.
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according to my advisors: causal.
what’s an ideal relationship?.
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@ericabuddington It used to be that when you saw a white person past 125th you assumed they missed their stop.
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Default Stata background; not reading this.
Evidence Suggesting Voter Fraud in Wisconsin Senate Race. In Milwaukee, a huge and improbable Dem vote dump flipped the race. In Dane and Winnebago, updates implausibly all improved Dem vote share relative to prior votes. Updates got more extreme after GOP pulled ahead. A 🧵
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Genuine piece of advice for those starting grad school: become comfortable feeling dumb all the time.
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we especially encourage applications from diverse backgrounds under-represented in economics
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In my first year of grad school, I was at a group study session when I got a call from my girlfriend. We had a five minute conversation where she broke up with me. I went right back to the study session and did another 2 hrs of macro problems. I WAS LOCKED IN.
sometimes u gotta speedrun every single stage of grief within 25 minutes and then just lock back in.
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Acemoglu during his free time.
This man made a drawing of Beyonce Rihanna and Nicki Minaj at the same time.
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Still trying to come up with a job market paper idea and it feels like you can only choose 2 😭
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Students in their first econometrics class:.
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Can someone tell me how to make the points to the right of 0 go more down so I don't feel like I wasted a month of my life?
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I'm doing some incredible social science right now. Just a glimpse into the groundbreaking work going on. The common man could not even comprehend.
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Writing up the bachelor party itinerary in LaTeX like a professional
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My top suggestion for making economics a more welcoming profession?. Ban ξ.
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Tried to explain to my high school friends what I do for a living
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looks like my results are not robust to controlling for that variable that I should probably be controlling for
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I'm going to be so good at relationships after this class on marriage markets/household decision-making.
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Guess who got an award for their interdisciplinary research and a positive income shock!. Special thanks to my good friend Jessica, colleagues Gerardo and Mary, and third year paper readers, Charlie Brown and Brian Jacob.
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My date when I tell them I'm almost 30, still have 2 more years of school, and make $34k/yr
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This is a joke based off a conversion with my girlfriend, who writes a very nice feminist magazine, which you should read instead!.
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My parents moved here from another country—traveled thousands of miles and left behind friends, family, and opportunities—just so their son could tweet about economics and missing his ex-girlfriend.
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I'm getting a PhD in economics so my kid can be an unemployed writer. This is the immigrant dream.
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Luigi could have been a great economist in another life.
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Grad student who procrastinates doing homework by doing research.
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Meticulously crafted job market presentation vs senior professor who wants to talk about some cool correlations
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I like to run a regression at least once a day to remind myself why I'm doing this.
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I got 99 problems, and they all related to econometrics.
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The only way to make meaningful progress on a project is to sign up to present it in a seminar - nothing motivates you to get stuff done than the possibility of looking dumb in front of a room of very smart people.
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@DavidAstinWalsh @Econ_Marshall Idk man, I think doxxing should only be reserved for the the most heinous situations like photo bombing an influencer during a baseball game.
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Y'all have heard of elf on the shelf, but have you heard of.
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not sure why people really out here getting upset over ppl using the word coup, like shouldn't you be working on one of your 15 papers that no one will read lol.
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what are the students in Columbia plotting.
Dep. Commissioner Daughtry says he found "a book on terrorism" at Columbia. (The book is not a how-to book, but a history written by a renowned British historian.)
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George Clooney plays a nobel laureate who traded in academics for punditry only to be roped back in to write one last paper.
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My heart weeps whenever I see someone under the age of 25 in grad school. You should be at the club right now. .
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My passion? To study some obscure and irrelevant policy change from 1977 that mildly affected 265 ppl in some counterintuitive way.
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@gncfosho I feel like graffiti like this would actually increase neighborhood rents because this is a clear signal that the neighborhood is becoming more desirable.
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I can't wait to teach undergrads this graph. I'm sure my explanation will be extremely clear and they will 100% understand what is going on and have no questions whatsoever.
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I'm a labor economist interested in studying gender (I always run a second regression with a female interaction term).
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