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A graduate student whose (excellent) second-year paper was accepted at a few conferences came to my office last week to ask me how she should prepare her conference presentations. Because I have never given much thought to how I actually do prepare for conference and seminar presentations, I told her I would write a blog post on the topic after thinking about it. So here is my list of tips on how to prepare conference and seminar presentations, in no particular order. I’m sure I’m forgetting many things; please feel free to include your own best tips in the comments section.

For those of you who (i) are thinking of going to graduate school, (ii) have an interest in food security, and (iii) happen to be US citizens, I am happy to announce that my colleague Tim Beatty and I were recently awarded a $262,500 grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture‘s (NIFA) National Needs Graduate Fellowship program.

This grant will fund three PhD students, providing each of them with a three-year fellowship. The theme of the grant is food security broadly defined. So for example, a fellow could study any aspect of food security, from undernutrition in sub-Saharan Africa to food stamps in the US, and everything else in between. That said, for students interested in international development, the grant does include some money for international travel–not enough to fund data collection, but enough to fund exploratory field visits.

On the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative blog, Frances Woolley had a good post about why beginner econometricians get so worked up about the wrong things:

[I]t is rare that I will have someone come to my office hours and ask “Have I chosen my sample appropriately?” Instead, year after year, students are obsessed about learning how to use probit or logit models, as if their computer would explode, or the god of econometrics would smite them down, if they were to try to explain a 0-1 dependent variable by running an ordinary least squares regression.

I try to explain: “Look, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make much difference to your results. It’s hard to come up with an intuitive interpretation of what logit and probit coefficients mean, and it’s a hassle to calculate the marginal effects. You can run logit or probit if you want, but run a linear probability model as well, so I can tell whether or not anything weird is going on with the regression.”

But they just don’t believe me.

Continue readingRookie Mistakes in Empirical Analysis