This PowerPoint was written by Amy Catalinac to show women how to overcome barriers in political science departments. The advice is excellent for women and men in economics. Many of the things she mentions I have heard before but always good to be reminded over and over again.
My favorite advice (this one is on how to get good letters of recommendation):
Jump at every opportunity offered, if it increases exposure to you/your
work or involves an experience that advisors can write about. Comes at a bad time? The quicker you get used to that, the better! Feel you’re not capable? Then you must say yes. People who only do
things they’re comfortable doing won’t reach their potential.
I also really like the advice about framing the paper. Many graduate students believe that the hard work is doing the data analysis and preparing those tables. Yes, that is absolutely important, but it also takes A LOT of time, energy, and thought to understand the significance of the numbers in those tables. It is your job to make that significance "obvious" to the readers. The tables are not enough.
My advice for third year paper writers at UConn: Do not wait until the week before the deadline to start writing up results. Writing is hard work. You can always do more data analysis after you have a draft of the introduction written. My bet is that the process of writing will inspire really nice ideas for further data analysis.
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