Today a PhD student in a US agricultural and applied economics program who is not yet on the job market asked me: how do I prepare myself to be competitive for both academic and nonacademic jobs when I graduate? I’m sharing what I said to them here, as I think others would benefit from hearing the answers as well. As always, my perspective is just one perspective on all this, but I hope it's helpful. Suggestion 1: Inventory your skills and take steps to develop new skills Wh

I spend a lot of time thinking about the job market for economists and a lot of time reading job advertisements for the Applied Econ Jobs substack that I started last March. To date, I haven’t really done much synthesis of that work. However, having just reached 1,000 job postings that I have read and curated myself (without web scraping or AI tools), I feel like I may have some useful insights to offer people interested in the current job market. Where possible, I cite data

I was chatting with some folks today about mentoring students, and I recalled a presentation I put together last year for the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Early Career Mentorship Workshop! I thought these slides and resources linked to in them might be of interest to others so figured I would share here. Click on the presentation below to download the slides as a .pptx file.

A few fun things about teaching at your undergraduate alma mater, in no particular order: You end up sitting next to someone on the bus...