Yes, I did finish the PhD program @berkeleyecon in 4 years. There's a story behind this which is neither legendary nor remarkable. The punchline: it was NOT by design. (A Thread)
When I was a student, Berkeley had a 3 semester core sequence, so you didn't begin their field courses until the 2nd half of the 2nd year in the program. I took a field course in my 2nd semester, which was a lot of work, but allowed me to finish my fields earlier than others.
After my first year I received a research position for the Summer where I found my dissertation topic by accident. I stumbled upon it while researching child costs in household surveys but found I could do food demand. So I found a research topic that was doable early.
By the time I was finishing the core courses in the 1st half of the 2nd year I was taking my first field exam in Dec. and working on the data that would be part of my dissertation. It required a lot of manual coding so very laborious, but doable and I was still in classes so OK
By the end of my second year I was able to complete my two PhD fields as well as most of the requirements for the MA in demography and continue to work on what would become my dissertation. Having @delong & Ron as a co-advisors helps because smart people know what you should do.
Cannot stress enough the importance of the Economic History Teas that @MarthaOlney hosted. It was where you got used to talking about your work and getting feedback at preliminary stages (those "labor/applied lunches" are basically seminars, & very stressful for students, IMO)
In my third year I was working full time on the research and the economic history faculty told me that Spring that I had a job market paper and I was ready to finish. That is literally how it went. It was not by design in any way imaginable, it was unintended.
I was also working mostly outside of the department itself, hanging out in Demography with @blqueiroz. This probably helped because econ grad students can be quite taxing and competitive and it drained people's energy. I was not in Evans Hall very much, tbh.
Recall that the job market was very different then. People did not have papers under review or published then. In my defense, however, all three chapters of my dissertation are published, so I think I did a decent job. But that's the story. Nothing legendary at all, so stop!
Those three chapters are linked here: jstor.org/stable/3874879
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
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