Research Opportunities at Tufts
With all the newly accepted Tufts students looking to make their final college decisions, I started to think of what blogs might be helpful in making…
Last week, my advisor asked me to help out with an event he was running for the Tufts Economics Society all about research opportunities in the economics department. I was thrilled to hear about the event and to help out by sharing my experience writing a thesis through the department. As a prospective student, I knew next to nothing about the economics department at Tufts, or really any department for that matter. I did not know what I wanted to study, so I did not spend much time exploring particular departments at the universities I toured. It may have been helpful, however, to know a little bit more about a couple departments I was interested in, as learning about a sample of the departments could give a sense of the academics as a whole. So here is some insight into the economics department, through a research lens.
As a prospective student, you’ve probably heard that Tufts is a research institution. At a macro level, that means that students and professors are engaged in discovering new things. But what difference does that make for your experience here? I will take my best shot at answering that question for an economics student at Tufts. Students in the department can engage in research in a variety of ways. Firstly, many classes in the department require a research paper. My sophomore year I wrote a literature review of the economic reasons behind the unemployment gap between natives and African immigrants in France. After a couple years in the department, research turns from qualitative literature synthesizing research to quantitative research all about interpreting data. Students can then conduct an independent research project in the form of a two semester honors thesis or a one semester independent study. These research projects fulfill requirements for the economics major and, speaking from personal experience, allow students to develop a close relationship with a professor interested in the same topics within economics as themselves.
There are several other opportunities for research as well. One is summer scholars, a university-wide program, that gives students a stipend to conduct research on one of the Tufts campuses over the summer. This is a great way for rising seniors to get a head start on their thesis or get a sense for whether they enjoy economic research. Another is becoming a research assistant (RA) for a professor in the department. Professor Parsa, for example, is currently looking for an economics student to help build a dataset that she will use to study women’s political participation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Just from reading the job description, I get the sense that RAs will learn about political science, how to conduct a literature review, how to quantify ethnographic interviews, and how to work with and interpret a Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.
As you can see there are plenty of ways to get involved in research in the economics department at Tufts and I am confident there are many similar opportunities in many departments here. My advisor who led the session is happy to meet with any students interested in pursuing any of these opportunities, proving the department is there to support its students and help them make the most of their time here. I also offered my contact info in case any students were interested in hearing more about writing a thesis, as I met with a couple seniors writing thesis as a junior, which provide quite helpful in deciding whether to embark on one myself.
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