I was lucky enough to be asked by one of my favorite undergrad professors, Ed Whitelaw, to come back down to Eugene to speak on a panel of his past students to speak. The topic included a career day regarding economics and what such an education means in the real world. Here are a number of the questions and my associated answers:
What economic tools/fields do you see as most critical to careers in your area? Has this changed during your career:
Undeniably, I would say that econometrics and the thinking of scarcity are probably the biggest tools that are taught in economics that shine in the real world. It’s surprising how many important decisions are made without consideration for the costs. For example, if you implement a process, that process has to be maintained into the foreseeable future. If that process has an exorbitant amount of costs associated with it, and your manager just says “yup that looks good” without knowing the full scope of the costs, that can put you in a really dark hole sometimes trying to keep up. And, at least in my field, it’s astonishing how not known econometrics is and how many causality problems it can solve. Granted it’s only one tool in your tool belt, but still, it’s really important to understand for prediction and inference problems.
Insights you may have into the ease/difficulties faced in changing jobs or even career paths:
Two things, I think it’s important to realize that your career is just a part of your life and doesn’t fully define who you are as a person. That said, it’s important to always have the narrative to fit you moving jobs. If it’s because this new job interests you, you want to learn something, or you just said screw it and moved to a new state, all of those are fine. But as an employer, a concise and detailed narrative not only illustrates your ability to think about problems, but illustrates what is important to you and your experience.
What do you and your own colleagues look for in a job candidate:
For the record I don’t have any experience in hiring, but from hearing colleagues, just be nice, personable, but rational about the hiring decision and how you portray you abilities. This fits in with the need to define a concise narrative. Remember that the employer is hiring you to fulfill a unit of labor to satisfy some certain production function. There is nothing wrong with asking that! Does that meet your experiences? Can you learn to satisfy the needs of that function?
What are your favorite parts of your job:
The dynamics of it. Specifically, similar to Ed’s class when you are running the comparative statics of a policy or a given situation, it’s surprising how well that skill can be developed and how satisfying it is to find the route cause of a change. Basically, for most jobs, and especially for analytically devised jobs, every lever has an effect, and while it might be hard to find that effect, it’s there somewhere, you just have to find it.
When first entering the job market, what were your views of academic vs government vs private industry positions? Have these views changed during your career:
When I first entered the job market, I was really focused on startups in certain interesting areas, because sadly I had all of these weird thoughts on how the real world operates and the morality of institutions. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but at some point, you just need experience to prove to people that you can do x. I think academic positions, while it might take some time to get the opportunity to land on, give you a TON of flexibility to explore, which makes sense given the nature of research. Industry positions allow that to, but to a watered down extent. At some point, the job you are hired to do has to be done and you might need to short cut. Well maybe not short cut, but you are restrained by more constraints. That said, there are also REALLY interesting problems out there that industry solves. As Ed told me once, never lose track of the market and what it’s doing/needs.
Comment on the benefits of being flexible with job opportunities:
I think this is an important one. Many people in economics will beat the drum to “never constrain your job opportunities with location preferences”. I think that’s true, but I didn’t follow that rule. Why was the Jackson Hole summit hosted in there with Paul Volker? Because he liked to fly fish. More importantly with job opportunities, I believe, treat every opportunity as a building block to make you better and to teach you new things.
Insights into how to integrate yourself into the department/institution/firm that hires you:
This was something I believe I struggled with at first, especially at my new position at Umpqua Bank. Coming from a startup, where literally pretty much anything goes, from arcade games, drinking at work, flip flops, and the whole farm, stepping into a publicly listed company with a dress code was a bit of a shock. I still remember the first day someone asking me if I was married (mind you at 23) or if I had kids. Regardless, of the department or institution, treat everyone as humans and just be yourself? It might be cliché, but what else is there to do?
Speak to the employment opportunities to undergrad econ majors, econ Master’s students, and econ Ph.D. students at your organization:
I guess it depends where and how you want to contribute. We have a number of economics graduates and statistics PhD’s working on our capital planning teams attempting to quantify the amount of potential defaults across the Bank’s loan book. Additionally, a LOT of high skill candidates are required for regulatory and risk mitigation teams. For example, our model risk team is basically a bunch of extremely smart statisticians make that (not only make my life a living hell) attempt to mitigate the risk imposed by using models to quantify business decisions. Lastly, you could work in the finance department for budget planning, strategy teams for driving the future initiatives of the bank. The world is your oyster.
What economic fields do you see as providing the greatest career opportunities in the years ahead:
Dare I say it, because I despise the hype word, but I think the big push in industry to utilize “Machine Learning”. While it is basically a glorified word for statistics, this push by industry will have spillover effects for economic fields. Obviously, it depends which industry you are in, but knowing causality is SO INCREDIBLY important, and I cannot stress that enough. All of your professors might have thumped you on the head to drill that “correlation is not causation”, and it’s true. Machine learning models might be incredibly useful for prediction, but, and I mean it, the fact that econometric models can be used for inference is important. People, unless you are at google or some crazy startup, don’t like black boxes and they want to know what’s going on. Just as you won’t trust a palm reader, not many people will trust an answer if they don’t know the reasoning behind it. So I think economics is going to be so useful for that problem. Computer Science too, because everything needs to be engineered correctly.
Other words of wisdom to share with the audience:
It sounds cliché, but always stay humble and never assume you are right. A lot of problems in our world have been introduced by hubris. Entire economies have fallen because of it. I forget who said it but the quote goes “I would rather hire a person with an IQ or 100 whom thinks they have one of 80 than someone with an IQ with 110 who thinks it’s 150”. Also, know that you can have an impact on this world. Look up Tyler Cowen, and you wont be sorry.