Next hiring cycle

Applications are closed for summer 2026.

We will likely hire undergraduates in fall 2026 for a part-time role in winter quarter 2027. The ad will be posted to handshake.

We will likely hire an undergraduate for summer 2027. If we are hiring, an ad will be posted on Handshake together with the other BFI summer RA positions. In 2026, we posted an ad in February and had a submission deadline of March 11. Data tasks were sent and interviews were done in late March.

What we look for when hiring

Our ad for a summer 2026 RAship received over 40 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
  • If you have done the work, you should record that somehow (github is preferable)
  • If you have not done the work, communicate that you didn't do it and why you didn't do it; this avoid PIs or other RAs searching to see if work was done.
• 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