Life update

A life update: I graduated today! I’m a doctor now. B)

I started working towards an Econ PhD in 2012. Then, as a graduating Business Administration student, an Econ PhD seemed unattainably distant. Over the next couple years I learned more math, became a Coro Fellow, and worked at Red9.

Coro felt like a sideways move: it wasn’t directly connected to academic economics, but I learned a lot and gained some valuable real-life skills (like how to get and give a business card, how to actively listen and ask good questions, and how to critically analyze my own thought processes). Red9 felt a lot more directly connected, since the data analysis was high-frequency time series stuff and the theoretical modeling involved a lot of derivations, but it ended up being much less relevant than I’d expected. Learning R was one of the most helpful things I took from my Red9 experience, but in hindsight Coro was probably the most helpful thing I did to get through the PhD in 5 years. Funny how that works. I finally started grad school in the Fall of 2014.

Grad school was tough. I struggled a lot in the first couple years, first figuring out how to be a grad student, then with what to do research on. Teaching was fun; my Coro training helped me immensely. In the first year (and during my time as a Coro Fellow) I was also working 5-30 hours a week on Red9 stuff, which was cool but also made it harder to focus on doing well in school.

I came to grad school thinking I’d use applied micro methods to do something at the intersection of development, labor, and finance, but found that I liked theory a lot more than I expected. I ended up focusing on recursive dynamic stochastic modeling and environmental economics, which eventually led me to orbit use.

I defended my dissertation, “The Economics of Orbit Use: Theory, Policy, and Measurement”, on April 2nd. Over the next few months, I’ll start posting more. At some point this will include a non-technical summary of my dissertation work. For now, I’m just thrilled to have finished at last. Hooray!