My Academic Journey

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...

This week, I was lucky lucky to be in the Annual Meeting of the Finnish Association (KT-päivät), which is the biggest conference in my field in Finland. Here are some few words about the keynote speakers in the conference and photos of the facilities. The conference started with coffee that we missed and a registration around 10 am. It took 2.5 hours by car to get there and we enjoyed seen the sunrise. In the fist day, we had one amazing keynote speaker Ulrike Malmendier  who spoke about experimental economics that is a new field withing economics taking into account the psychological capacity of humans. She told us about research ideas that related to own experience counting for more than read knowledge. Her students had made a small experiment with Chinese farmers. They had one control group, one group that was told how beneficial the (heavily subsidized) insurances were (from now on "more educated group") and one group that played games ("own experience group...

It has been a while from my last update. Now, things are very different. The core courses are passed and I have started to write down the first article that I am conducting with my supervisor. I spend most of the autumn coding with STATA and hold the exercise sessions for microeconomics II. At first, the coding was very boring, I admit. Yet, it became more and more interesting as I learned more about it. Shortly, my graduation might actually happen some day and I enjoy my work.  As the most studies are done for now and I don't any more relate so much with the term "student" (although the tittle is doctoral student), the blog carries a name "My Academic Journey" to suit better for the research oriented degree of PhD. The old name "My kind of student life" was meant to describe how differently one might complete the bachelor and master degrees. I did a lot of choices in favor of academics over social happenings as my goal was to became a PhD student...