Alumni

Recent RAs

  • Steven Shi

    Steven graduated from UChicago in 2022 with degrees in economics, math, and statistics. He spent three years working for John List’s team, with a focus on the economics of education. Most recently, he has used various software packages to help the team analyze gender-based sorting into STEM programs in America and Sweden, the effect of loss aversion on teacher performance via monetary incentives, and the excellence gap between students of different socioeconomic backgrounds. He is currently working as a predoctoral research fellow at MIT for Professor Amy Finkelstein, and he hopes to enroll in an Economics Ph.D. program in 2024.

  • Charles (Charlie) Brobst

    He is a second-year master's student at Purdue University, working on a Joint MS in Computer Science and Statistics. Before that, he was an Econ major with computer science and applied math minors at Pepperdine University. He first joined the John List team as an undergrad with a lot of raw knowledge, but few refined skills and little research experience. In his first summer, he was introduced to a lot of new tools (Python, SQL, Stata) and given an opportunity to learn on the fly, with support from the RP's. Since then, he has leaned heavily on a lot of these technical tools in all kinds of data analysis and cloud computing, both with the team and elsewhere.

  • Josephine (Josie) Bachus

    She is a rising senior at the University of Michigan, majoring in Business - Associate Consultant Intern at Bain & Company. She was an RA for the team in the summer of 2021 and helped in projects related to early childhood education. She gathered, shaped, and organized data for an ongoing field experiment. She also contributed to writing portions of a paper. In her current role at Bain & Company, she conducts research, analyzes and visualizes data, and approaches problems creatively every day - all skills she says that she was able to grow initially in our program.

Scholars that were RAs of our program

  • Steve Cicala

    Associate Professor, Department of Economics at Tufts University

  • Lint Barrage

    Associate Professor and Chair of Energy and Climate Economics, ETH Zurich

  • Ian Muir

    Director, Data Science at Lyft

  • Jana Gallus

    Associate Professor, UCLA Anderson School of Management

  • Min Sok Lee

    Assistant Senior Instructional Professor, Department of Economics at University of Chicago

  • Ethan Lieber

    Gilbert F. Schaefer Associate Professor of Economics. University of Notredame

“Working for John’s team helped me build my technical skills from the ground up. When I first started, I didn’t even know what Stata was. ”
— Steven
“I met and befriended several other RAs! It’s always nice to meet others with similar interests, and being an RA is a great way to do that.”
— Steven
“It’s hard to see myself even knowing what to go out and learn without the tasks I’ve been introduced to here. The opportunity to learn on the fly while working towards meaningful results has been incredible. I feel like that’s one of the most underrated aspects of education, and academic courses just can’t compete with applied research experience.”
— Charlie
“Being in John List’s RA program gave me access to a dimension of economics that I didn’t even know existed! This was possible due to the mentorship the program provides - my supervisor was there to answer any questions I had every step of the way. ”
— Josie