Originally posted as a Twitter thread.

Miscellaneous things I learned in [econ] grad school:

1. The returns to experience are high(er than I thought)
- Someone who has studied a single topic for a decade or two or three really does know a LOT about that topic

One way you can see this: the way experienced faculty have seemingly photographic memories of subsections of papers and interactions in seminars from years ago --

In the same way that experienced NBA/chess players can have photographic memories of games

2. Even in the 6-year PhD, you can see slow-growing returns to experience. This feels weird!

Eg only after years of seminars did I begin to feel attending was ever worth the time (compared to just reading the paper). The brain sometimes needs LOTS of training data to rewire

3. All that said though, youth/fresh eyes are still crazy powerful for "thinking about things" ie research
- It's bonkers that a 20-year-old can bring insight to a topic studied for ***decades*** by others

4. It's hard to keep learning new things while doing research

While doing research, it feels like there is a temptation to just grind on the research, and not continually invest in learning new things. Tough balance 🙃

The pressure is to *produce now*, which can lead to myopic underinvestment in human capital

"Fail[ing] to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow", as Hamming put it. Extremely real!

On the experience of grad school:

5. It's more like high school than undergrad: it's a smaller environment, everyone knows each other for years; it can feel like you're less in control of your fate (imho)

6. Or: grad school is more like being unemployed than it is like being employed. The amount of free time is nuts and it drives people mad

Unstructured time can really screw with people's heads. In that respect, grad school is more like unemployment than high school for a lot of people.

— Cameron Harwick 👾🏛 (@C_Harwick) October 28, 2020

7. Academia in general has fractal complexity (this is true of many careers of course): in a lot of ways, the more you learn about what it's like, the more you realize you don't know
(🙃)

8. For example -- this was embarrassingly not clear to me before starting the PhD; trigger warning: naivete -- the classes are 90%+ about teching up, not about discussion

Or:
9. At the frontier, it is not clear whether (written) papers or (oral) seminars matter more...

From the outside, you only see the papers -- it looks like academia consists of the papers. On the inside, it's clear there's less reading and the seminars matter a lot

10. In general, academia/grad school is an oral culture (i.e., not a written culture), and it pays to just talk with people to share information

You can overinvest, but taking the break from research to get coffee with friends and just blab has high EV, in my experience

11. Relatedly: everyone warns you about spending too much time being overly strategic ("just work on your research")

But you can also easily be not-strategic-enough! You see people on both sides of the Laffer peak

12. Sometimes I think of academia as a royal court:
- clear hierarchy
- reputation/status are omnipresent
- *everyone knows everyone* (not really, but it can feel like it), literal *names* matter a lot
- obviously the exclusivity
- ceremony, patronage, etiquette, court intrigue..

^"being like a royal court" has both negative but definitely also positive aspects, to be clear!

cf

Academia has an "honor" culture similar to US South

In the South, politeness rested on undercurrent of violence against threats to honor

Academia: delicate balance of power from implicit threats of negative referee reports, discussions, tenure letters etcsustains niceness

— Arpit Gupta (@arpitrage) July 9, 2019

13. Something that took me longer to learn than I'd like to admit --

Papers are mini textbooks. It's not about having "one big insight" (maybe it used to be). It's about fleshing out *everything* related to your topic (within some bounds)

14. On fields. We're still living in the aftermath of the credibility revolution
- We're still picking the low-hanging empirical fruit made available thanks to these tools; and status in the profession is allocated accordingly

plausibly this is efficient ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

15. On conferences. Conferences (for me at least) have to be exercises in ruthless energy management

16. Relatedly, for doing theory research: it was weird switching from my entire previous life where "time" was the biggest constraint to "energy" being the biggest constraint

(though for most empirical/coding work it's still "time" in my experience)

17. In education, *teaching effort* is that which is scarce

As a student, I would hear education policy recommendation X and think it sounds sensible. As a teacher, I hear X and think about "well that has a benefit, ...but it requires costly effort from the teacher"

18. (A few) things I still want to understand:

(i) The division of labor in different kinds of academic teams. Team production functions vary a lot?

(ii) The life cycle of the academic researcher. How sharply do goals change over time? How much of that is constrained vs. not?

⇒ Back to essays ⇐

---