UChicago Economics Grad School Alumni Interview
Main Interview
Please tell us your name, your MA program and year of graduation, as well as your current role and title.
Francisco Mendes, MACSS Economics, 2022. I am currently a Senior AI Engineer at Renesas Electronics America Inc.Can you tell us about your journey after MAPSS-how you secured your current role?
I think I had a pretty long journey to get here, but the short version is that I was recruited by on campus Consulting right out of our program. I spent about a year in consulting but having already had 5 years of Consulting experience I decided it was time for a change. Having worked primarily in recommender systems and signal processing in my entire consulting career, I decided to look for a career in that realm and here I am.Did you always know that you wanted to seek placement in the academic or professional realm? Did this journey change at all for you?
For me, I was really committed to go into the PhD program directly after MACSS. I think the opportunity was there to do so provided grades and research interests lined up. After attempting to transfer internally I was offered a pre-doc position to strengthen my resume for application to the Econ PhD program. To me a pre-doc program was not a feasible route to a PhD, I have several personal misgivings about the pre-doc system in Economics (it encourages primarily students from wealthy backgrounds to enter academia, it is not a competitive wage market equilibrium etc)How do you feel that the MAPSS-Econ/MACSS-Econ programs prepared you for the role that you are in now?
For me, my prior education in pure mathematics and statistics was probably most relevant to my current role. Econ programs in UChicago are a great way to learn some of those mathematical skills that are transferable to other domains. If you are certain you want to transition out of academia, I would highly recommend taking classes that reflect the domain you are interested in.Is there anything that surprised you during your post-graduate pursuits.
I think the one thing that surprised me (and continues to surprise me) is what a closed circle economics is as an academic field and how far it is from the economic and social realities of America. While you are in UChicago it may seem like Economics is all pervasive field that impacts the lives of many Americans, but reality is quite different, most of what we study here is very distant from the lives of everyday Americans. Even fairly well informed people will struggle to name leading figures in academic economics and most academic economics is irrelevant to policy making.Can you tell us any important advice you have for graduating MAPSS-Econ an MACSS-Econ students?
The first thing I would say is enjoy your academic life, single-mindedly pursuing a field of study and answering a research question that motivates you. If you have decided that you want to try moving into industry then prepare accordingly. Either way take charge of your career!
Other Random Thoughts
Expanding on some of the answers above ended up being worthy of a subsection, please find these below.
Pre-doc Programs
Economics is probably the most competitive grad school program in America right now. The number of applicants to the number of spots is quite high. The pre-doc system is a way to get a foot in the door, but it is not a guarantee of a spot in the PhD program. I think the pre-doc system is a cheap way to get labor for the university while parading itself as a way to get a better signal of ability. A pre-doc is no better signal of ability than grades and the Master’s research thesis. I believe if you are from a background that allows you to stay out of the job market for 2-3 years in your early twenties, then the pre-doc route does not cost you much. If you are older or have financial constraints, I would recommend against the pre-doc route. Pre-docs add, at best, a marginal signal to your application (outside of UChicago) because no one knows what you did. If you are not given a PhD at the place you did your PhD, other universities will look at you like a lemon (if you are not good enough for your own university, why would we want you?). In fact UChicago does this with pre-docs from Stanford and Harvard, they are not given PhDs at UChicago. It is very rare for a pre-doc to substantially increase their chances of a PhD at any place other than the place they did the pre-doc.
Transitioning to Industry
I think the most important thing to do is to take classes that reflect the domain you are interested in. If you are interested in AI, take AI classes. If you are interested in finance, take finance classes. Most of the economics program prepares you for one thing, a career in economics. Do not mistake the difficulty of the program for its usefulness and transferability. While the mathematical and statistical skills you learn, definitely make you better than a plug and play data scientist, they are not enough to get you a job in industry. You need to send a strong signal to the market that you are interested in a particular domain and have immediately applicable skills. The code you write in your classes is not enough to signal this. You need to have a portfolio of projects that you can show to potential employers. These days the coding requirements for most AI roles are quite high, you need to be able to code in Python and C++ at a minimum.
Economics as a Field
None of what follows is meant to be a coherent argument for or against the field of economics or the flavor of economics at UChicago. I think there are many benefits to both. What follows is simply a summary of my observations about how different conversations with fellow econs are versus everyday people (Americans for the most part). I had the habit of names dropping famous economists to make a point in everyday conversation, such as “as Milton Friedman said…” or “as Gary Becker said…” or “as John List said…”. I quickly realized that no one knows who these people are. I think the field of economics is quite closed off from the rest of the world. The field is not as influential as it thinks it is. That is for both better and for the worse, I think the field should be more relevant and more engaged with people outside the field itself. But in many ways it is for the better, I think that while you are in economics (especially at UChicago) you do not realize how ideological some of the classes are. For instance, price theory is really an ideological class that is not grounded in reality. Some of it might be true, but large portions are ideologies and assumptions about how markets work. When engaging with fairly well-informed individuals about economics, I realized that the goal of research at a deeply tactical level ends up being finding a niche and churning out papers in that niche. This in itself is not a bad thing, but if you zoom out (even a little bit) from that niche you realize that the research is not relevant in everyday conversation. I can think of two great examples of this. The first is any experimental behavioral economics research study, while many of the conclusions are interesting and unique, they remain just that interesting and unique. They are not generalizable to the population at large. And of course economists are the first to admit this, but this is a much bigger impediment to everyday conversation than they realize. I guess the main misgiving people have is that to the field of economics, every problem seems to be a nail (prices, wages, incentives) and the solution is always a hammer (money). Thus, every societal problem can be framed as one that can be solved using the right incentive structure. But this is a bigger ideological hurdle for most people than the field admits. The second would be the idea that markets work, this is purely a UChicago “fantasy”. Markets work in many cases and in many cases they do not. In either case, to the average American, the idea that markets work is not a given. While we spend a lot of time working out the math after establishing a set of assumptions, the assumptions we make are not as easy to establish to a jury of your peers, as it were. As an econ you are drawn to complex mathematical structures and their solutions (a matching is a lattice and a stable matching is a fixed point on the lattice, who wouldn’t be excited?!), the actual solution matters less than the assumptions and narrative around the problem.
Post Mortem
I enjoyed my time at UChicago and definitely enjoy the field of economics. I think the program offered me a lot of opportunities to grow and learn. I think the program is a great way to learn some of the mathematical skills that are transferable to other domains. But there are certainly some things you need to do (on your own) to get the most out of it professionally. Especially if your previous degrees are not relevant to industry.
