With a son in college and a daughter applying this fall, it’s time to share my advice on how NOT to pursue a PhD because I’m an expert.
Before jumping into self-criticism, I did two things well in grad school:
- I spent eight years in grad school and earned three degrees without paying one penny because I held a fellowship every year.
- I studied hard – inside and outside the classroom – and learned a ton.
However, I made three gigantic mistakes:
| The wise thing… | What I did instead… | |
|---|---|---|
| Research | Explore and search till you find a solid research topic, then go all-in on your topic. Make your research and your presentation as strong as possible because that – plus faculty references – are the only things that matter when searching for a professorship. | Follow your curiosity wherever it leads. Never stop asking questions, exploring new subjects, or studying new things. Spend hours wading through journals in libraries every afternoon. Read business magazines cover-to-cover on weekends. When you find answers, don’t polish it into a publishable paper or practice presenting it. Just move on to the next interesting subject. |
| Relationships | Develop strong relationships with faculty members. Find a main advisor and several additional mentors early and meet regularly with them to discuss your research and theirs. | Wait to find an advisor, then meet only infrequently with them and other professors. Don’t bounce rough ideas off them because that’s wasting their time. Wait till you have a finished dissertation. |
| Focus | Focus on your PhD subfield because finding an academic job requires writing doing impressive research in your subdiscipline. | Write a dissertation on labor economics while intensively learning Mandarin, studying the US and Chinese governments, and reading business magazines cover-to-cover. |
You may say, “That’s all obvious!” It should have been. But none of it was explained to us at the time, perhaps because it seemed obvious to the faculty. Anyhow, you now have no excuse for repeating my mistakes.
I was an unusual grad student in that my interests were inherently multidisciplinary: I had studied government in college, completed an economics MSc at The LSE, then spent my first two years at Stanford in the business school’s political economy PhD program. So I wasn’t pursuing “just” an economics PhD, as most of my classmates were, especially after I plunged into studying Mandarin. So there was some method behind my madness.
Although academia seldom rewards breadth of knowledge, I believed my broad knowledge would equip me for the challenging and intrinsically interdisciplinary role of analyzing the politics and economics of China. I had fellowships to study in China the year after completing my PhD and hoped to polish some of my previous research while there. I also thought that as I became increasingly fluent in Mandarin that I would be able to strengthen my China-related research.
Had the US military not literally blown up my dreams of becoming a Chinese political economist, my highly unconventional approach might have paid off. After all, there couldn’t have been many American Mandarin-speaking economics PhDs in 2000, as interest in China was booming.
Most who pursue a PhD struggle to find an original, potentially publishable research project. I had the opposite problem… I was drowning in them.
I managed to finish my economics PhD despite spending way too much time studying Mandarin and spelunking in libraries for interesting books and articles. I thoroughly indulged my curiosity. For many, this is necessary to find a good research topic. I already had way too many and should have focused on polishing one or two of them. In fact, several of my fellow grad students ran with my ideas – with my blessings – and launched academic careers on them. I, full of curiosity, wasn’t worried about publishing. I instead kept reading and researching widely in economics, government, and China and discovered a bunch of innovative, publishable ideas. But I got only a few published because I spread myself way too thin and because I was obsessed with proving things to myself but became bored/lazy at the thought of polishing my findings to publishable quality. For example:
- I received a revise-and-resubmit from the prestigious American Economic Review for a paper empirically demonstrating – using data from both a two-state, restaurant-by-restaurant survey and a fifty-state, many-year dataset I compiled – that raising the minimum wage actually increased fast food employment. My finding – based partly on the discovery that people earning minimum wage have a high propensity to consume fast food, so raising the minimum wage boosted demand substantially – was heresy back then, but I believe economists have come to accept this over the subsequent 30 years. I never resubmitted but easily could have (especially as I wrote well enough that a professor criticized me for “writing too clearly”).
- I wrote a massive paper warning that certain institutional features of U.S. governmental institutions perceived as fixed rested on little more than tradition or convention and could some day be eliminated by a simple majority, anticipating Mitch McConnell’s 2017 invocation of the “nuclear option” to eliminate the required 60-vote margin and confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court with just 52 senators approving. (The present occupant of the White House is presently manifesting similar concerns.)
- My unpolished dissertation – a grab bag of labor economics topics, such as how China could build a pension system to incentivize employer-paid worker training without inefficiently locking employees into their present employer (by compensating firms via a pension transfer diminishing with time elapsed between worker training and the worker switching employers) and an empirical analysis characterizing what I termed “high-performance work organizations” – was so extensive that my advisor made me remove several large chapters.
- I wrote a paper laying out the history of how big rubber/tire, oil, auto manufacturers, and bus companies conspired to destroy US trolleys and drew lessons for China on how it could do public transportation better.
- I co-authored an empirical paper I did all the econometrics for that the professor subsequently chose to publish in a journal using an interpretation/theory I disagreed with. I withdrew my name rather than sign on to his theory. (He believed the median Congressman got her/his desired outcome on every individual issue. I was a big believer in Lyndon Johnson-style horse-trading.)
- The only paper I got published while in grad school was another paper I did the initial empirical analysis on before the lead author handled multiple rounds of revising and resubmitting.
- My undergraduate honors thesis – on what I termed “the demand-side ratchet effect” that ratcheted state spending up over time because governments tend to focus in good times on using increased revenue to expand benefits while focusing in bad times on avoiding cuts during times of need – had won Harvard Government Department’s award for best thesis on American government, and a professor wanted to turn it into a book with me, but I also failed to make that happen.
I regrettably left a lot of “money” – well, academic currency… interesting research projects – on the table in grad school.
If the aforementioned White House occupant doesn’t destroy American higher education, I hope my mistakes will some day prove valuable to someone who reads this.
With thanks to Patrick Robert Doyle for his photo shared through Unsplash