My Academic Journey

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...

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. ...

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...