My Academic Journey

Even though, I am an introvert, I miss my colleagues enormously. I like being around people, even if it requires more energy than staying by myself. But enough of the background information. Currently, I enjoy working from home. This is how I get science done from my home! Most of the things that work here, are likely to work later at the office. Try some of them out! :)  My alarm went off before 7AM. I do my daily Duolingo practice and get out of bed. Then I head to the yoga mat. Time for some morning yoga of 10-30min. Then it’s time for breakfast. The work day starts by taking over a part of the kitchen table. When I am ready, I set up my Pomodoro application on the phone and start by either planning the day or checking what I have planned. One the road to productivity (c)FotoJan My first productivity “secret”: Pomodoro. It is a technique helping with concentration and with remembering to take breaks. Brains are muscles just like other parts of the body. ...

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...

"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...

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 ...

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...

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...

Yesterday, the plans for research exchange took big steps. The Doctoral School of the university of Vaasa arranged an info-meeting concerning all the international possibilities that we PhD students can take advantage of. Our international coordinator Juhani Moisio listed all gateways to abroad and Virpi Juppo listed possible places to apply for travel grant and reasons to do a research exchange. We also got advice for 1) when to start 2) where to start and most importantly 3) talk to your supervisor.  They also noted that the process is different if you work for the university of Vaasa. This is my case. As the plan is to stay two semesters, I need to check: HR supports this exchange (supervisor, project cordinator and host: check) the social security taxation personal expatriate insurance expatriation travel plan register at the destination country (in Scandinavia we don't need visas)  And funding for the spring term (my contract ends in December)   HOUS...

The easiest thing in coding is forgetting the commands. Luckily, Google can help. This morning, I wanted to combine the scatters that demonstrate the characteristics of our data and explain why some observations are outliers . twoway (scatter dlnfixasset dlny) ///        (lfit dlnfixasset dlny),  ///         ytitle(value of change) name(dlnfixa)    twoway (scatter dlnfixasset dlny) ///        (lfit dlnfixasset dlny),  ///         ytitle(value of change) name(dlnfixa)    graph combine dlnfixa dlnfixa And the result is a cute picture containing both scatters ! But here is a cool real life photo (from Leisson Café). The Friday Lunch is the best part of Friday! (We don't usually get burgers and dessert) Have nice weekend! 

The best side of academia is the access to stimulation. This afternoon, Hamed Salehi presented his and Juha Joenväärä's paper "ETF Holding and Stock Selection Skill Among Institutional Investors" in the  finance seminar series.  The foreign terminology made the following a little bit challenging to an outsider like me but it is  refreshing  to hear what  other  research. The biggest take away I got was that institutions started to use ETF's in 1999 where as the first ETF's date to 1993. Since then, the share of ETF's has grown if they are used in the portfolio. The biggest institutions use typically ETF's and ETF users usually have more analysts than non-user's have. The non-users tend to have more  constrained  portfolios.  However, bigger institutions usually have more analysts.  My lack of  background  in the area probably affected on the upper explained take away. Yet, ETF's interest me quite a lot and I have been...

The day started with starting STATA that is one of most used software with empirical economics, like R. If doing a theoretical macroeconomics, Matlab would be a good choice. Today, I have been multitasking. While the code runs, I'll focus on a online lectures about academic writing . It is free but the certificate costs. The quality is the standard Stanford (which is amazing) so far. But as I'm coding at the same time, I listen to each multiple time. The coding is still on the middle way as the idea was to different results with the new data. However, this accounts as a robustness test. Better get back coding but first some words about practicing editing and some picture! The sun rising at 7:20 AM. (no filter!) To share some enjoyable tricks on editing: in making the sentence sort, save the original sentence. Edit the words that are not truly necessary. If you don't like the result, you can use the original version. This ease the process especially when you hav...

After yesterdays deadline, I feel a sudden emptiness. Today, I submitted (probably) the last funding application of this spring. And now what?  The Morning Sun  1) Possibility of an another conference deadline 2) Cool happenings at the university of Vaasa 3) Data update --> adjustments to the code --> new text and the results might change --> even more to write.  4) Personal development options online 1 - The conference is unfamiliar but clearly it has some history: link to last year pages .  Although, there is one familiar Finnish economist as an organizer. Other good aspects: the deadline is after the last date of submission results to the other conference I submitted the paper and the target paper presenters are PhD students!  2 - The university of Vaasa has more than enough things to keep you busy. The Energy Week is approaching. Next week there is a welfare training session about mindfulness. On Thursday, the Fin...

To get good food is important as it stimulates positivism for the entire day. Thus, this post is a thank you to our lunch restaurant, Cafe Leison , where I went for lunch alone today as there were no one else present. Another specialty of our department: researchers from doctoral students to emeritus tend have lunch together . As we are small and open department, there is very little hierarchy. And no, I'm not trying to avoid telling about my writing process....  As we moved to this beautiful side of the building called Tervahovi , my friends and I faced a temptation to just eat fast in the employee restaurant Alma where university supports the lunch by couple of euros. However, the food is better at Cafe Leison.  Alma, the place to eat right around a corner from our office. I was super happy for pizza and extra dessert that is typical on Fridays.  Leison cafe <3 But. The. Research. I guess you don't care, but I have almost 3000 words. It...

When you wonder why the university is empty, wonder no more: it's probably the time of the Exam Week. Morning emptiness.  Morning light and fog. I declared to myself that the data chapter is done (for now). The method and results shall also be doable no reader is going to check them with the introduction and conclusions are bad. The goal of today has been to get some words down to the background chapter that still need a lot more attention and is far from finished. I don't like to tell about thinks that I have to do. I think it's better just do them. Here, is a sentence that is likely to appear in the final version of the research paper:    “ How and why does knowledge spill over is more than an academic question ” concluded Audretsch and Feldman (2003) . I am unsure if it is okay to start the introduction chapter with direct quote, but for now Chapter 1 starts with word of Audretsch and Feldman.  Why is spillover more than academic issue?...

 Have you tried out yoga, body balance or something similar? In university of Vaasa, it is very convenient to train at the Vaasa Sports Club that is located on the campus. Last week I went to body balance at 7.30 am and my head was full of thoughts related to work. Those thoughts were in my head during day and they also come to my dreams. Today, I could concentrate on the movements much better. Firstly, the work trip is done and secondly I believe that balance had a role to play. When I was at work after the training, I was on fire. I finished a task after task. Yet, I admit, in the afternoon I was very tired.  Our office is divided into two parts, mine and Saara's. My desk is messy when I am in the middle of a process or project where as Saara likes it clean and organized. What I need more than physical organization is an organization in my mind. For that purpose training yoga or body balance is pure gold.  Our desks and a window.  The Window!...

Writing about the data was an ease. it is actually at least as cool as the coding itself.   The first words of today's advises.  Today was almost perfect but then my computer, my darling, refused to log me in. After restarting twice, I took him to the ICT management that told me to my relief that my darling had just dropped from the domain. What a relief! At the same time, there was a possibility to ask (stupid) questions (that will make my laptop and my relationship much smoother) and update some settings. ICT management was better and faster than I had thought. In minutes my laptop was back to normal Some spirit lifting of today:  The weather is (again!!?!) perfect. my mascots <3 And, the lunch. This is pure lucky: the super salad and pannacotta as dessert. Results so far shortly:  5 min free writing gave the first sentences to the Data chapter! Wow.   Data description starts to be long enough but still I would ...

The view of the other window.  Today's suggestion were full of cool ways to get started. But! I just started explaining our data issues and I am still doing that. Additionally, I made already the outline during the first days. It is a relief to see that some ideas have developed even further. Still, I need much more new text per day as I wrote today. MAYBE it is time to change tee to coffee. The day started with 5 min writing challenge. To start from somewhere is the hardest part of it. Again from it, I gained one cool new context of the research. This is how the advises for today look like:  My favorite advise so far (even though I didn't exactly follow this as I already had some text) The order of presentation in my field is much more simple: introduction, theory, empirical stuff, results and discussion.  Yet, all in all, I'm "late". Friday wasn't as productive as I hoped. The train was fully booked because of the winter holiday an...

On Monday, I started mentally preparing for the early wake up today. On Wednesday, I went to body balance at 7:30 am (- and I was late). Today, the train left at 7:00 am (and I made it). It was the same train that I took sometimes to the core courses of FDPE (Finnish Doctoral Program in Economics) , held in Helsinki. My visitor card at the Statistics of Finland.  Today’s schedule looks busy: afternoon goes to a project meeting about the data contraction. I expect to be back in Vaasa at 9 pm after which I have a meeting with my friends to whom I have promised to make a small discussion outline about (personal) savings. That’s a subject that I could write a lot about. 1) Finnish people should save more as my generation cannot trust to have the state paid pension. 2) How nicely the savings accumulate into a fortune if you start saving early (historical perspective) and 3) there are awesome stories about how people have retired early or how people are saving for it. ...

A deadline for a nice conference is approaching. I have preliminary results, some knowledge of relevant literature - and a will to try.   I printed slides from the same author as here  but a bit in different form. From now on, I try to follow the steps and finish the first preliminary version of the paper in approximately 7 days . And yes, I need pressure. That is why I make it now official. If I fail, I buy the best chocolate bar I know and give it to my boyfriend. I will not eat the chocolate, I'll just watch him eating... I promise.  This also a good test for the advise as this is my first article. I have written two thesis (bachelor's and master's), but this is very different. If you have tried these advises before, please let me know. Bikes in front of Fabriikki building. About the normality. The snow is still with us. As typical, bikes are in use. Additionally, we were blessed again with the sun shine. After the dark winter, to see the sun...

We had an  assignment to write about our research in "understandable form". I already submitted my explanation (and I just spotted one unfinished sentence) so here is a part of it. I hope it makes sense to You. If not, I need to improve.   "Never thought about where all the frontier knowledge really come from? Yes, we have that research and development units that push the knowledge frontier forward. Yet, not all new knowledge to us is new to everyone else. When companies trade with each other, they learn from the others competences and organizational systems; this is called an economic spillover effect. Sometimes, they learn how the middle product should be developed to generate more value to their customer company. Sometimes, they see good or bad habits of the management those they self can employ or avoid. So, no wonder our estimations of knowledge in economic growth are lacking . Researchers are making the fix with spillover effect. However, the channel a...