Dissertation proposal and life in the immediate future

Sorry for not updating - a couple people have kindly asked how the proposal went and I fell off the radar a little. It went great - they signed off on it. Somewhat unusually they asked questions as if it were a seminar (i.e., during my presentation rather than afterwards), which threw me at first but it all turned out fine. It felt like a lot of questions and comments, but none of them fundamentally undercut anything I was doing or my approach. Lots of work ahead still of course.

This weekend I'm going to be presenting some work on a generalized maximum entropy version of propensity score matching at the Southern Economic Association conference. I'm chairing a panel on GME. This is work I started last fall and have gotten back to intermittently. I'm still trying to figure out what I think of the simulation results - they're a little mixed (but at least they don't come out completely against the GME set up). It might be worth finishing off as a methods note somewhere. Several of the policy analysis journals have a regular methods note section that I think it could work well for. We'll see.

The week after that I'm presenting work at a National Academy of Engineering workshop on the engineering technician and technologist workforce. I'll be presenting a paper on work-based education and training (internships, apprenticeship, and on-the-job training) to a closed session and a broader paper on the workforce to an open session. Then the following week I'll be presenting my GME work to a methods group seminar here at the Urban Institute.

After those go through I think I'll feel a little less stressed. Of course the Sloan project on the STEM workforce continues, as does the project work I'm picking up at the Urban Institute. The plan is to defend this summer, Sloan will wrap up around then, and then I'm going to be transitioning to full time work at the Urban Institute and hopefully raising some money for projects of my own in short order.