Five Signs That
You're an Economics Grad Student
by Priyanjana Pramanik
1. You’ve
started referring to Stata as a person:
Once upon a time, Stata was just another software.
But slowly, it became the centre of your
existence. Now you can’t imagine your life
without it, and you catch yourself saying things
like, “You need to tell Stata that the
variances are unequal, otherwise Stata won’t
know what to do. But then once you do that, Stata
gives you exactly what you need, and all this
extra stuff too!”
2. You
express your feelings in more and more inventive
ways: Being a grad student is a joyful,
uplifting experience, but is not without its
moments of frustration. When you say, “I’m
going to Benveniste-Scheinkman my way through
this midterm”, it is not a good thing.
3. You
see Greek letters everywhere: In a
simpler time, you didn’t know what the
letter psi was called. Maybe you even referred to
it casually as ‘the trident’. But now,
those days are gone. Your days are filled with
gammas and alphas, upsilons and phis, and even if
you don’t know what they mean, you can
differentiate the Hicks out of them.
4. You
can kill cockroaches in your sleep: The
natural habitat of the grad student is basements
and dimly lit labs. We share our ecosystem with
creepy crawly things and things that don’t
make any noise in the night. Our eyesight has
adjusted to our lowlight surroundings, which
means we can detect the slightest flicker of
movement out of the corner of our eye. The
hapless cockroach may be hit with anything from a
hole punch to a hardcover edition of Hubbard and
O’Brien’s Macroeconomics.
5. You
memorize what you do not understand: No,
I have no idea why the formula for the stationary
limiting equilibrium in a particular problem is:
But you know
what? I can Benveniste-Scheinkman it like a pro.
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