Job Market Survival Kit

In the depths of job market preparation, I compiled this bizarre collection of lifelines. It's part wisdom, part coping mechanism, and part reminder that if Obama could find time to read while handling international crises, I could probably handle one more practice interview. This is the stuff that kept me sane -- hope you find it useful too.

Songs that are secretly about the job market:
  1. Spotify Playlist: Listen and find comfort in knowing even pop stars unwittingly understand the academic grind.

Useful reminders:
  1. Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 47 times. Behind Edward Hopper's masterpieces is a series of sketches. Creative process is inherently messy and chaotic.
  2. If Barack Obama found time to read amid the Arab Spring and the killing of Osama bin Laden, so can you during the job market preparation.
  3. Parable of the arrow: When struck by a poisoned arrow, it is crucial to remove the arrow and treat the wound, rather than waste time questioning the arrow's origins or the archer's motives.
  4. Parable of the airbag: When you know with certainty that you will be in a car accident someday, invest in advanced airbag systems rather than dwell on the inevitability of the crash.
  5. Under pressure, you always go back to your habits. Building habits is preparing for the worst-case scenario.
  6. “The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.” - Sun Tzu
  7. Sprezzatura: You have to put in more effort to make something appear effortless.
  8. Clear writing gives poor thinking nowhere to hide. This is also why writing is difficult.
  9. "When you plan something well, there's no need to rush." - Thomas Shelby
  10. You'll never feel successful unless you create your own definition of success.

To slow down time:
  1. Interval trainings using a fan bike.
  2. Plan out your day. See Ben Franklin's example or other routines of famous creatives.
  3. Use a time tracker to record your daily activities.
  4. Start a new habit and witness how long it takes to reach 100 days
  5. Take a different route from work to home
  6. Have "signposts" on your calendar, which are activities that you look forward to doing
  7. Geographies with multiple seasons (winter, summer, spring, fall) also extend the perception of time in retrospect

When in need of a tangible productivity boost:
  1. Start by creating the Right Now List
  2. Classical music for when you’re on a deadline
  3. "5-4-3-2-1...act." -- the 5 Second Rule is a technique that helps you overcome procrastination and take action by counting down from 5 to 1 and physically moving towards your goal.
  4. AI tools to help you read papers: Typeset, Unriddle
  5. "Academic writers cannot get writer’s block. Don’t confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department. You’re not crafting a deep narrative or composing metaphors that expose mysteries of the human heart. The subtlety of your analysis of variance will not move readers to tears, although the tediousness of it might. People will not photocopy your reference list and pass it out to friends whom they wish to inspire. Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement." [source]
  6. Refer to the 12 concrete ways to get more Dakka

When burned out:
  1. Live cameras at San Diego Zoo
  2. Paintings
  3. Ultimate freestyle rap videos by Harry Mack
  4. Lofi and Games with casual games and music
  5. Collection of motivational videos by Michelle Ellsworth

When confused:
  1. Draw your latex symbol to find out what it's called.
  2. Notes on empirical methods in corporate finance by Todd Gormley
  3. Notes on applied empirical methods by Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham
  4. Notes on applied econometrics by Peter Hull
  5. Online books on causal inference: Matheus Facure Alves, Scott Cunningham
  6. Literature on recent advances in applied micro models by Christine Cai
  7. Notes on empirical asset pricing by Ralph Koijen and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh
  8. Review of canonical asset pricing models by Kenneth Kasa
  9. Principles for combining descriptive and model-based analysis by Neale Mahoney
  10. Principles for Log-Linearization guide by Joachim Zietz

When in need of a perspective:
  1. Job market timeline overview by Alex Albright
  2. The purpose of a finance professor by Alex Edmans
  3. "It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that."
  4. Quotes
  5. Of Rules and Razors

When in need of an even bigger perspective:
  1. The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Contained somewhere in this infinite library is our JMP.
  2. The modern interpretation of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae implies that everyone is driven by the pursuit by (i) money (wealth), (ii) pleasure, (iii) power, or (iv) fame (honor). So which one is it?
  3. How to Grow Old by Bertrand Russell
  4. List of best best alternate histories
  5. Best places to retire: US states
  6. Philisophy Bro explains complex ideas of philosophy in easy to understand language.
  7. "Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for." (Dead Poet’s Society)
  8. Résumé Virtues are the things you put on your resume. Your professional accolades, education credentials, titles, status, net worth, and more. Eulogy Virtues are the things people talk about at your funeral. Whether you had a clear purpose and worked with meaning, whether you were curious and interested, whether you were kind, loving, and trustworthy, whether you were a loyal friend, partner, and parent, and more.

When it's showtime:
  1. My thoughts on delivering academic presentations