Notes on NABE conference
Nov 8 · 2 min read
My quick notes on NABE tech conference in Seattle Fall 2019
Notes for economists and new grad trying to get into data science field
- Learn to code in Python/R well. It will help you tremendously to get a job in tech company and as a data scientist overall. SQL is also important.
- Although there are many different fields, especially STEM, whose students trying to get into data science, economists have certain advantages in our way of thinking about causal inference, intuition and measurement. Look, amazon hires a lot of economists and other companies are following that path. In addition, while you may feel the competition is fierce, there are only a handful of qualified candidates and you are certainly one of them with a PhD in economics.
- Communication skill is key. You needs to sell yourself, you need to communicate your results to influence product directions and decision makers, be it engineers, marketers or product managers. Practice communication skill regularly.
- Invest in interviewing skill, and I can’t stress this enough. In academia and in life general, people don’t want to sell themselves, they prefer to be modest and secretly hope that people will eventually realize how great they are. In interview battle, you have half an hour or half a day to impress the interviewers that you a great fit for the team. Interview skills do make a different here.
- Understand the value of economics phd: economic intuition, thinking through models, more care for data/measurement, causal inference.
Things to do with huge pay-off
- github
- review of causal inference
- build a project: text analytics and deep learning
- quick notes: synthetic control group
- https://www.aeaweb.org/webcasts/2019/aea-afa-joint-luncheon-impact-of-machine-learning
- double selection method https://medium.com/teconomics-blog/using-ml-to-resolve-experiments-faster-bd8053ff602e
