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...

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 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...

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...

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?...

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. ...

Quite unsurprisingly, perhaps, this feels doomed. Or maybe it is the weather: it snows heavily even though it is probably hard to see from the picture.. Today's task was about "tiny text" = abstract. Well, now I have the first abstract draft version but I am sure it is not good enough: the data is unmentioned and my supervisor surely wants it there. Adding it, however, will violate the sense of "flow"... I decided to get back to that later. The questions to start with and then the rule of placing the answers into an abstract were helpful. That was painless! Even though, starting with the abstract felt weird. Next, there were suggestions for the title. I made five competing titles, couple of them look quite cute. But is cute good enough? At this stage probably yep.  As it feels that there are too little to do for these first days, I peeked to the next day. I wanted to kept the concepts as a secrets that I read then in the mornings as that made me sta...

So, now it really started. I find a need to  sketch  the literature review part. I am planning to write first from the big picture, which is the theory of growth here, and then go nearer and nearer to the literature dealing with the main issues of this research. The main part of today's guideline.  From  How to write a journal article in 7 days  I had to identify today what is driving the research and typical headings of that sort of a paper. So far I have now a some sort of table of content. It feels too little for one day. Yet, today I identified how I should write the paper. (This sounds silly.)  The gain of this paper is the empirical results. The text needs to stress what have been done in the literature, how this research relates to them, the methods and of course the results. A draft of a draft of a draft.  Today's specialty in the workplace was a visitor from Rome. Thus, this week we are very internat...

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...