Bragging on my summer academy mentee(s)

For the past several years I've served as a mentor for Urban Institute's Summer Academy, where we have ten undergraduates come for 9 weeks in the summer to do a research project.

A blog post by my mentee this year - Javier de Paz - just went up online. This is just a quick introduction/background to his project on after school programs and English Language Learners. He's going to be presenting his research tomorrow afternoon and will finish writing his paper this fall.

Last year I mentored Laura Zapata - this is her finished paper on immigration enforcement policies in Tennessee. While we didn't get a chance to use individual level data with her, this was exciting to work on because we implemented a difference-in-differences model, so Laura learned a lot about the sort of identification problems we've been discussing on here recently w.r.t. fiscal multipliers. She also expanded the paper to the entire country for her senior thesis this past year.

Before Laura I mentored Vanessa Cruz - this is her finished paper on the educational attainment of first and second generation immigrants. Vanessa is now working towards a PhD in political science at the University of Michigan. You can take a look at her current research here.

I've mentored for three of the four classes of summer academy students - this is one of the things I'll miss most about Urban.

I'm not sure if any of my readers attend the APPAM fall conference in D.C., but if you'll be there Javier will be presenting his research on a panel there. Also I'll be presenting work on Georgia's job creation tax credit so drop by during my session too.