Student Post: Working as a Research Assistant for Professor Bruce Meyer

Hear from Derek Wu, fourth-year PhD student, about his Research Assistantship with McCormick Foundation Professor Bruce Meyer, who studies poverty and inequality, tax policy, and government safety net programs.

Much of my research over the past couple of years has been in collaboration with Professor Bruce Meyer, with whom I started working in the second year of my PhD program. While at the time I was primarily interested in the economics of education, I was looking for an RA opportunity to learn more broadly about the ways in which government policies could reduce poverty and rectify inequities.

It turned out that Professor Meyer was also looking for an RA to work with him on a new project measuring poverty and income distribution while studying the effects of government tax and transfer programs in the United States. One of the biggest selling points about this project was the opportunity to work with large-scale survey and administrative microdata, including tax data, government program records, and household surveys.

During my time working with Professor Meyer, we have produced a number of working papers on which I was a coauthor (two of which have since been published) and are continuing to produce analyses that will hopefully turn into additional papers. Many of my fellow classmates have had similar opportunities to work with and coauthor papers with Harris faculty members. And thanks to the relatively low student-faculty ratio at Harris, professors here tend to be open and willing to mentor and collaborate with PhD students.

I have spent significant time accessing the data at Census Bureau Headquarters outside Washington, D.C. Back in Chicago, I am also able to access the data at the Census Research Data Center at the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, and I am intending to use these data for my dissertation. Working closely with professors also provides firsthand experience in learning how to conduct research from conceiving an idea and thinking about the conceptual framework to finding the data and executing the analysis. It can also open valuable doors for accessing data and presenting at seminars and conferences, paving the way for you to eventually establish yourself as an independent researcher. 

Read about another Harris Student, Matt Shomo, MPP Class of 2020, on how he got his research assistantship.