DC: The Job

Ostensibly, the main reason I was in DC was for my internship with AidGrade (see my previous post about AidGrade here). I've been telecommuting throughout the summer, but I wanted to meet some of the people I was working with and see Washington DC. Eva Vivalt, the economist who heads the program, was unfortunately away at a conference in Taiwan, but I did get to meet several of my fellow interns and Timothy Catlett who helps guide us through the meta-analyses.

We worked at the Georgetown University library, which is located on a beautiful campus (although, I think I prefer K's library to Georgetown's). Timothy is a graduate of Georgetown and both of the other interns in DC are students there. It was fascinating learning more about the school. Georgetown has a large number of international students, and from the stories I heard, they often come from very high up places in countries like China and Singapore. The entire school, in fact, has a very international focus, with an entire School of Foreign Service that sends many of its graduates into the State Department and CIA. Georgetown itself is still a Jesuit affiliated school, but apparently its student body is very diverse.

The first thing you see as you step onto Georgetown's campus

Besides seeing Georgetown, I also learned more about development economics. Developmental economics isn't as sexy as macroeconomics or antitrust stuff, but evidence based aid and trying to do the most good with limited resources has been seeing a surge in popularity as it becomes feasible to perform more controlled experiments in development. Developmental economics straddles a few different domains. It's very statistics heavy, but from what I understand doesn't get into the more abstract mathematics you find in other fields of economics. It involves working with a lot of public health issues, but delves into areas like microfinance and women's empowerment as well. Certainly there are many academics involved with developmental economics, but most members of the field are more involved with hands on projects (things like AidGrade or actually performing impact evaluations in other communities). It's a fascinating area, and I'm not sure whether or not it's what I'd want to do in economics. Apparently, once you decide to do developmental economics, you're kind of put on a separate track from other economics specialties because it involves a very different set of skills. I'm glad to have made some connections in this very unique area of economics.