Trying to Think of Ideas for Dissertation Papers?

Here is the quote for you: 

“It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready.”

― Theodore Roosevelt

Coming up with ideas for good papers is hard. Sometimes they come out of the blue and the data cooperate. Sometimes, they....don't. It's hard to predict when the ideas will come. The important thing is to be prepared. Know the literature. Write down fragments of ideas, even bad ones. Keep up to date on interesting identification strategies. Be prepared so that when a good idea comes your way, you're ready to recognize it and implement it.

Stata Trick: Plotting Coefficients with Confidence Intervals

Arindrajit Dube (@arindube) just tweeted code for plotting regression coefficients with confidence intervals. As if that were not enough, he also plots the different categories of coefficients in different colors with labels for the categories! So helpful! Click here for the twitter thread. 

This is what the code produces in the end:

Your Grant Proposal Just Missed the Funding Cutoff? Hoooray!!!

Good career success is on its way! See this article or you can just have a look at this picture published in The Economist describing the article:

 


"The authors discovered this by collecting data on grant applications submitted between 1990 and 2005 to America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) by junior-level scientists. In particular, they focused on two groups of applicants: those who received relatively high scores on their submissions but just missed getting a grant, and those who scored similarly well but just succeeded in being awarded one.

The three researchers found that, rather than automatically holding the failures back, as the Matthew effect might be thought to predict, an early-career setback of this sort was sometimes associated with greater academic success in the long run. While those who missed out on funding were more likely to drop out from the NIH system, the scientists who persevered and continued to apply for grants after their initial failure outperformed their counterparts who had succeeded first time, as measured by the number of citations of their research that they received over the subsequent ten years."

So carry on! Don't give up! Keep working!