Tomorrow I have the orientation for the new graduate students attending our program. This is a talented and interesting class on paper. We had 200 applicants to our PhD program, admitted 50 and about 35 will show up. The profile for our incoming class is:
- 3.6 GPA
- 760 GRE-Quantitative
- 630 GRE-Verbal
And in terms of interest our incoming class listed the following as the reason for attending GMU:
- Austrian Economics
- Development and Transition Economics
- Law and Economics
- Public Choice and Political Economy
- Religion and Economics
- Experimental Economics
Our students are unusual for PhD students and many of them are more likely to be weighing a PhD in another discipline rather than another economics department when making their decision.
These students are about to embark on an exciting intellectual adventure. The first year is pretty standard at GMU as the students need to demonstrate proficiency in mathematical modeling and statistical testing. But the seminars offered and the discussion groups that emerge provide the students with ample opportunity to pursue their broader intellectual interests. Still the major challenge they will face is learning to prioritize and focus their energies on mastery of technical economics.
For those entering the PhD program with the hope of pursuing an academic career, they need to start thinking about research papers right now. For students coming from an out of sync department such as GMU the most important signal they can send is with published papers in refereed journals, and in particular published papers in mainstream journals. Failure to do so will result in a frustrating job search. I have been telling graduate students for a decade that the formula for success is:
PhD in hand + refereed publication(s) + strong teaching evaluations = tenure track job
The other factor in this equation is the "lunch tax" that the individual represents. The more difficult the person is to take as a personality, the stronger publications they will have to have in order to signal that they are worth it.
In my experience both as a student and then as a teacher at NYU and now at GMU I have found that no PhD student who satisfies all the conditions in the above formula has failed to get the desired result of a tenure track appointment. However, I have known several students who have struggled through graduate school and then failed to fulfill those conditions and then experienced a frustrating job search and disappointment with their chosen career path.
As my colleague Bryan Caplan has argued, once a PhD student realizes how important refereed publication is for successful academic job search those who want to pursue that path should infer --- through backward induction --- that they should start working on publishable articles TODAY so that they will appear when they are on the market in their fourth year.
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