My Academic Journey

I want sincerely thank The OP Group Research Foundation for supporting my desired research topic! The grant distribution occasion was full of warmth. OP is proud of having given a grant to the only Finnish Nobelist in economics and encouraged us to aim high. I am also very thankful to know that the research plan has been read by two to three other specialists than my supervisor and that they found it promising. In the uncertain world of PhD fellow, that means a lot.  Another big joy is the joy for all of our full-time econ PhD students . Saara Vaahtoniemi and Jari-Mikko Meriläinen who each got a grant for one year of research.  Team Econ Vaasa: Meriläinen, Vaahtoniemi & Eklund Worth mentioning is a person who has inspired many (and 100% of Team Econ Vaasa) to study economics, Matti Pohjola, who held a speak at the event thanking OP for being very responsible in financing research when the government is doing the opposite. Indeed, the concept of OP group research...

In the end of last year, I signed up to another academic writing class because of a requirement of the degree. As visible in the blog, I have searched writing advises online and also participated to an academic writing class with emphasis on grant application writing (very relevant in Finnish system that doesn't guarantee salary for PhD students unlike the Danish model). Previously, I had participated to a writing class aimed for PhD's with my master thesis at Stanford. Thus, my experiences are quite broad.  Today, I want to reflect a little of the recent class. We had a groups of three students, two reviewers per one article. We discussed my paper and the discussion highlighted the same that my host here says (he is the best btw). I should explain more, elaborate more and, in general, describe more. Shortness is my writing type, it seems. The opposite would be being too wordy. Yep, no wordiness problem in academic contexts. In the end, however, the discussion of writing p...

In the third workshop, we had professors Vibeke Lehmann Nielsen and Carten Jensen to tell us about publishing. They also pointed out that as a young scholars, using time for non-academic writings and presentations is not strategic: they don't count towards tenure. This conflicted a lot with the discussions that I have been following in Finland. Like at the conference in Pori, Finnish professors were telling how scientists should be more openly in social media. Additionally, in our evaluation format there is a place for public visibility.. Maybe I should rethink about blogging? Although, I am not using my "work hours" for writing here - which is why the topics and texts are quite light. In any case, it is something to think about in addition to should I stay (in academia) or should I go (to industry) . a tired doctoral student. The biggest take away from this workshop was cover letter in which you should tell the editor "why this is a must -pub...

The doctoral students of political department had organized a two day seminar far away from campus (although nothing is actually really  far in Denmark). The ride took couple of hours and the place was astonishing. Steffen Armstrong Gjedde told us about using new media. Quite many had a researchgate account and also academia.edu was mentioned. To me, there were several new hints even though I already had had some lectures about it.  ORCID - to make sure your research is linked to you. it helps also with name changes. Mendeley - you can use it for reference organization tool? I better get to know this. CreativeComments - helps to deal with copyrights and to allow the use of your material.  But that's not all! We also received useful links. One of them is  http://www.phdontrack.net/  which has a section about literature review (a part that I find hart). It indeed looks like a good resource. Then,  Altmetricblog  was recommended f...

The advantages of the office start to feel normal and - the research is going great! I'm used to having possibility to get a fruit and thus be able to stay later at work. I'm used to the free good coffee. More importantly, the advises and comments that I have got from Carter, who is my host here, have encouraged me to think deeper.  There has also been a lot of social interaction, like a team running yesterday (Aarhus motion).  Today is the summer fest of the Business School and tomorrow is the summer party of the student "kollegium" where I live. I have also made a lot of excursions by my self.  This morning, we had Ismael Rafols from Valencia to speak about his current research ( Exploring (mis)alignments between science supply and societal demand ) of how scientific research supply correspondences to the societal demand of research. In short, research is driven by funding that is affected by intention groups. The solution is not always the optimal one. The...

I managed to find the right building and the right research center: Dansk Center for Forskningsanalyse (CFA) . Everyone is very friendly, helpful and welcoming. The coffee machines are amazing: there is cappuccino! There is also plenty of different kinds of tea to choose from. This should promote everyone's productivity! My office is also very cool with two lovely roommates. The table is electronic and I got to borrow a brand new keyboard and muse. The keyboard felt so good that all I wanted to do was to write my first article. (I was also happy to discover that the draft wasn't in as bad shape as I remembered.)  No wonder that PhD takes here only three years!  Oh, and on my way back to home, I only took a wrong street four times (with googlemaps of course). Biking with google maps on your phone and that phone in your hand is hard. Additionally, the bike traffic is hectic. It will take a while to get used to it and to remember the way home by heart.  So, all ...

Finally, I am in Aarhus. For now, everything is good. But obviously, everything didn't go that smoothly. It was very very hard to say good bye to my loved one and, let me be honest, I wanted to cancel the whole thing when heading to the security check. But I didn't. The second and third flights left late from schedule. I was only worried for missing the third flight. I had booked my flight so that my mom would have the same flight from Copenhagen to Aarhus. She left from Helsinki, unlike me. However, there was plenty of time to have dinner at the Copenhagen airport (as the third flight was so late). Lovely place by the way.  I had one carry-one baggage, one luggage and a big backpack. The backpack didn't arrive. I hadn't had sufficiently time to fill the files at the airport as the kind airport bus driver came to check that all potential passenger would be on the bus. He gave me contact information to the airport and told that I could arrange my luggage later -...

"The world always needs to be saved right before the holiday", said my mom. She had made an effort to get me start the holiday early. Sadly, she failed in that. In June, I had a work trip once a week. I went twice to Helsinki for a meeting, once to a conference in Jyväskylä (where I presented the draft of the first draft for the first time) and once in Copenhagen to a DRUID conference (where I was a session chair). The other meeting in Helsinki was between our research team and the other was more formal steering group meeting. In a steering group meeting, we were suppose to present the current stage and plans for autumn to TEKES, which is financing the research project. Additionally, I wanted to clean my desk and get my research in a good stage - in order to leave with peace. Well, this year, I didn't reach the peace for the summer holiday. Maybe for Christmas then :) Soon I'll pack my luggage and head to Italy. I plan to leave all work home (excluding one inter...

On Thursday, I was heading back to the central rail station, when I got an SMS from home. "You have a letter from the Niilo Helanter Foundation. Should I open it?". I quickly reply: "Opeeeeen it!". I wait for three seconds max, and phoned back to him. I was feeling excited and anxious at the same time. "Please say if it's positive or negative right away!" I begged. But why would they bother sending a 'no thanks' per mail.. Slowly, Jan started to read the letter. I wanted to scream of joy, but we don't do that in Finland. I had to be satisfied with crying out of happiness (quietly of course). The thing is, a grant makes you truly free. With a grant, you can go anywhere - if you like. I felt so free! Couple of weeks back, I learned something new about myself. Planning big and far motivate me the most. I know that some of the plans sound too ambitious but small plans make me procrastinate.  Some people roll their eyes at my goals. Th...

The spring is turning into summer and my calendar is happily filled with work trips. Today, I went to Otaniemi that is in Espoo (a city by the side of Helsinki). We had our project group meeting at the office building of VTT that is also coordinating our project. Additionally, Carter was present through Skype. It was good to have many members of the research team sitting by "the same table". Even though, I woke a 2.5 hours earlier than I'm used to, I manage to do a lot of work during the travel from Vaasa to Helsinki. Which is crucial for the next week's conference. From Helsinki, I then took a bus to Otaniemi.  After the meeting, I got a ride to Ruoholahti, Helsinki, from where I walked to the station. It is always a pleasure to visit Helsinki, my old home city. It has developed so much during the time I have lived in Vaasa (soon 6 years). Helsinki is more international than it used to be. The city is also more and more like Stockholm and other notable ...

I present here one simple trick that makes your estimation coding much much nicer and faster. I have been using it before, but not with the current laptop. Thus, I just checked how to obtain it. What does this magical code do? It creates a nice table of your estimation resultS. This enables you to check many regressions at once. Additionally, the table looks good and it uses the variable names you have in STATA. First you need the packet. Just type  ssc install estout, replace  on stata command window.  Then, when coding, you tell STATA that you want to keep the results by adding eststo:  in front of your regression. Here is an example with a loop.  foreach var in  spill1 spill2 spill3{ eststo: xtgls dlny $explanatory `var', fe } esttab using "$caritaoutput\output.rtf", replace ( note that  $explanatory gives me variables saved there by global command. It is used like this: global explanatory var1 var2 var3 var4 ...

Yesterday, the funding decisions of South Ostrobothnia Regional fund became official. I am very thankful for the funding, first one for me, which will enable my research exchange at the Aarhus university during the next fall. I was excited but also nervous when waiting to be called to collect the certificate. But when I heard "Kauppatieteiden maisteri Eklund Carita" I just stood up and walked to the stage - like automated. Unlike I had feared, I didn't stumble and soon the next person was also coming. Afterwards, I picked my favorite painting in the ballroom of the city hall of Vaasa and we immortalised that smile.  Photo credits: Jan Gustafsson Also the local newspaper Pohjalainen noticed this event held in the city hall of Vaasa. My colleague Siru Lönnblad and I made it to the front page - like many others. Another friend asked about the just received funding: "It does feel pretty nice doesn't it?" It feld fabulous to be trusted like this.  ...

Due to flu, I am late of schedule. A conference deadline is today. And I just discovered that my current version of abstract is far from good enough. Somehow, I still believe that I'll finish on time. As I was struggling this morning with the abstract, I again searched for advices, The first one was good enough:  How to Write An Abstract Philip Koopman defines 5 fraction in the abstract: Motivation - why should I read this paper? Problem statements - what are you aiming to solve Approach - HOW do you do it? Results - what you found Conclusions - implication ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Weekend is starting soon (except that there are still a lot of homework for the Writing better academic English class on Monday = work will follow me home) My final (for now) version followed those for steps with one exception. The abstract doesn't present the method of estimation and inste...

Red Ink , by PhD Comics Supervisor comments are sometimes... truly crushing. I knew this day would come but I couldn't prepare for it. What my supervisor did, was to delete, change a place of a sentence and then delete it. He wrote some sentences and some of them were really cool. But I felt crashed. I would prefer deleting it myself... Well, it is the draft of my first paper. It must have been horrible. Maybe the second draft produces less tiers. :)  On the bright side, this is a good practice for negotiations and argumentation. There are many points where I believe that I'm right. I just need to learn to express myself clearer. To sum, the upper picture is not only a joke. It is reality. (Comic from PhD comics ) Luckily, tomorrow is Friday.

The worst side of aiming to doctorate is the insecurity of funding. In a seminar of the doctoral school of Vaasa, we were encouraged to start to save. The dissertation is only the start if you're going to stay in academia and you should prepare for that, check for e.g. the Professor is In . The blog convinced me to buy the book and that was a money well spend.  The unknown future, photo credits: Jan Gustafsson . However, another strategy that I apply, is simply saving when I receive salary.  I have automated a part of that saving by purchasing two different index funds in three parts. That is  9 - 10 % of my net wage. However, that is far from enough because in addition to preparing for possible period of funding I doubt the pension system that we have in Finland. And yes, my salary is not very high at the moment (and the taxation in Finland is high)! Thus, the amount that I automatically save is  too small. Given the current situation in the markets...

Have you thought about starting doctoral studies but deadlines for next autumn already passed?  Good news: there is still time to apply in Finland! The deadline for doctoral students is 29 April  ( 31 October 2016  - although the previous link confusingly says 15th of November) in the university of Vaasa. Note: the exact deadline this year is 29.4.2016 even though the other link says 30. April. Here you can find more info regarding the intake. It is also noteworthy that there are other ways to fulfill the language requirement than the test only, see for more: admission The most important part of your application is the connection to the prospective supervisor and your research plan. The researchers are divided into research groups that you can find here . I am part of Intangible Capital Research Group , but we research also macro/financial stability, time series, environmental economics and how people understand economic facts.  But like other universities, ...

The Monday started with the third class of Writing better academic English . My biggest gain was that I can also draw. The upper picture is a visualization of the spillover effect that my dissertation is about. In the middle, you can see the home country (our point of view). We export a product that a trading partner uses in production. In that process, we can learn about their practices (organizational capital) for example. This is the export organizational capital spillover. We can also obtain a spillover effect from imported intermediate products. Importing a middle product is similar than exporting in terms of learning but we learn directly from their catalogs or the technology used in our ordered products (R&D spillover). However, patents protect the newest technology and thus the spillover cannot be strong for recent innovations. In the class, we went through some wordiness and academic writing style. The conversation took different tracks: How to refer age objectively...

Why is the simple act - simply starting to write - so hard? I have read many hints and the best so far has been the "How to write a journal article in 7 days" that I made a challenge . I found a suggestion of how to end your day at work. It would be good to clean your desk and write down things that you need to continue on the second day. This practice of using sticky notes actually works well for me. I like to write down what I need to do during the week and then before leaving home, I like to write down where I was. So, when I come back, I can pick easily the task that is still under process. The most important part of this practice is that it supports me to relax during the leisure because I can be sure to remember what I need to do. A note that I wrote to myself once: "update the estimation table and work with the introduction and write about learning by exporting literature". As the data was updated, I was worried that the results would change dramatically, wh...

Happy women's Day! To celebrate strong women, here is a speech of Nadia Jaber, who explains outside Academia options and tells her PhD career story. Just like her, I have searched online for different kind of career advice that resulted as activating this blog, following couple of blogs and buying a career advice book. The book tells about how to get a tenure track job. However, some outside academia options are starting to sound enlightening. It is going to be interesting to see where I end up, but here Jaber describes how much PhD students need career advices - and how to provide them to yourself: The Economist published a the glass-ceiling index . If you put 100% weight on education cap, Sweden and Finland are on the top. Indeed, when I started my PhD journey, half of the new PhD students in Finland were women. In our economic department, 75 % of PhD students that are present at the university are women. However, the professors and assistant professors are all mal...

Now it is the time of the year to apply for funding. I made a schedule to apply from three different foundation. There are also two other foundations that I might apply as well, if thing end up badly.  The first deadline was to day. I wish I had a feeling of relief but quite the contrary: A deadline of a course assignment is on Friday - and my supervisor had couple of unexpected ideas like a trip to Helsinki for a meeting of our research project.  But, it is not too bad: the air is full of opportunities and because of them, I have lot do. Application writing wasn't that bad either, it is actually enjoyable to think about the value, meaning to the region and layman version of own research.  Oh, and the course assignment. I loved the classes. A view from our office window.