What we look for when hiring

If we are hiring for a summer position, an ad will be posted on Handshake together with the other BFI summer RA positions. In 2025, this ad went live in mid-March and had a submission deadline of March 24. Data tasks were sent and interviews were done in early April.

Our ad for a summer 2025 RAship received over 100 applications. We screened applications in three steps:

1. We reviewed transcripts looking for students who had taken hard classes in economics, computer science, physics, math, and statistics and gotten excellent grades in those classes.
2. We sent ten applicants a task using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. The task takes a few hours.
3. We invited the applicants with the strongest tasks to an interview where we discuss their research interests, a paper we had written, and some data brainteasers.

We occasionally hire undergraduates for part-time work during the academic year, but this is less common. Feel free to email to see if we are looking for someone at the moment.

Advice on professionalism

(Thanks to Avik Garg and Josephine Dodge for writing the first draft of this guide)

Professionalism looks different in a class and research setting

• In workplace, many things are said only once; it's important not to lose comments
  • To build a habit of capturing everything, at first sending messages to PIs after meetings with everything you noted down is useful
• The most important thing is not the quantity of work; rather, PIs must be able to trust that your work is accurate
  • Work that is sloppy means that work must be later rechecked and thus likely redone

Deadlines, schedule changes, time estimates

• In doing research, it's important to communicate around deadlines
  • Making sure PIs know what your priority is and have an estimate, even if wrong, of time until completion is the goal
• Timely communication and checking for timing switches is important
  • Meetings will often move around and making note of new timings and communicating promptly around meeting times and any slack messages during the day is important
• Time estimates on work will likely be quite wrong, but they are still valuable
  • Don't be afraid to give a longer estimate for how long something will take; time estimates also serve as a useful way for making sure PI and you are aligned on what the task should look like. If you think a task will take a long time, that is very useful to communicate since it might help find the gap in understandings.

Additional notes for undergrads working part-time

• It's expected that some weeks will be busy with classes
  • Communicating this sooner rather than later allows for work to be rationalized and reallocated