Article Published in INOMICS
On July 28th, I submitted a short article to INOMICS, discussing my musings on pursuing a second master’s degree or a pre-doctoral research assistantship versus applying directly to a PhD program. This question puzzled me a lot when I was a master’s student. In this article, I summarized two common paths for PhD applications, usually with funding opportunities in the EU, and attempted to draw insights from my personal experience and observations. Editor Sean McClung and Managing Director Christopher Nash provided helpful feedback to improve the quality of the article. After some edits, I am pleased to report that it was released on August 29th.
Due to COVID-19, PhD applicants over the past two years have had quite difficult application periods. It seems common now for students to apply to a range of universities and not be accepted to any of them. In fact, even without this exogenous pandemic factor, admission to economics PhD programs has been becoming increasingly difficult as a result of the excess supply of PhD applicants.
If you go through curricula vitae of recent PhD graduates, you may find it’s not uncommon to see that a PhD owns two master’s degrees. As lots of MA/MSc in Economics programs are one-year programs, some students will pursue an MRes or MPhil in Economics afterwards. Others may opt for a degree in applied mathematics, statistics or another field with an intention to strengthen their quantitative and/or coding skills (summer school programs are another option to do this).
Even more common in those CVs is seeing a predoctoral research assistantship (henceforth, “predoc RA”). For many students, this job was done during their bachelor’s or master’s studies, while for others, it was a full-time predoc RA position in the interim before their PhD programs. Both of these cases are what the phrase “predoc life” refers to in this article.
As a current PhD student who has fairly recently experienced the application process, and who has quite a few friends and peers who have also had this experience, I’m sharing this overview to help others who are considering a PhD. This article is specifically for those students who are not sure whether to apply to a PhD straight away, or to extend their predoc career first.