Liberia on my Mind

So Sjona and I are in our last few days in Morocco. We are pretty much done with the field work (what little there was) and we  are starting to write up the report. From here we will be going to Portugal to visit extended family in a beach town for 2 weeks, and then on to Greece. While this kind of vacation sounds appealing, I am not sure how welcome it is after what seems like almost a year of forced vacation. I was feeling pretty down the last few days and I decided to say the long obligatory prayer, which I hadn't done in a while. In fact, I haven't really been praying for a while due to the crisis of faith that I have been experiencing. But that is a different story. Anyway, around the same time that I said the prayer, two things happened, I found out that my former graduate advisor submitted a version of my thesis to the journal Urban Studies, and I was invited to interview for an IPA position in Liberia, helping to manage an RCT testing the effects of former child soldiers into healthy civilian life. I interviewed for it yesterday, the interview went okay. She started out by stating how dismal my undergraduate GPA was, and asked why I wanted to eventually pursue a PhD in economics after quite a bit of meandering. I figure that I answered those questions okay. I flubbed a question about the difference between RCT's and before and after impact evaluations. Oh well, I definitely know now. Then she spent a while trying to scare me, the living conditions would be harsh. Rationed water and electricity, rent and imported food is three times that of Boston, so I would survive on Rice and veggies while in the city. Salary would be just barely enough to live there, and maybe not even enough for travel. Also, there are no real hospitals, so if I broke a leg, or got sick, I would probably have to be flown out to Ghana. For the country excursions, we would depend on fried goat parts and corn mush containing rocks. 85% of the country is unemployed, containing many restless former child soldiers. I just saw a documentary where they were touring the slums and interviewing former rebel generals, who told of massive murder, rape, cannibalism, etc. It is said that 70% of the women have been raped, and a good portion of the former child soldiers have eaten human flesh. Anyway, if I got offered the job, I would also have to contend with the fact that Sjona would be joining me in the Spring. What would she do, would it be safe for her? There is supposedly a Baha'i Academy that she could possibly serve at, but we can't find any information about it. Anyway, well see if I get offered the job. It would be a great opportunity both to serve in a righteous cause, and also for my career, as it would give me some experience implementing a study, the type of study I would eventually hope to design.

Guess I should keep praying

Update

This blog has been pretty quiet for a long time. I have been posting a lot over at Baha'i Coherence, but regret the fact that I have neglected the more personal side of journaling. A few days ago I was looking over the blog from the beginning, and found it very interesting to read my thoughts and opinions from 4 years ago, 2 years ago, etc. It has been especially useful to trace back what I was thinking-when I was doing it because I have been going through something of an identity crisis regarding my career. From the time I graduated with my masters, I have been somewhat adrift. I worked at ARES for a year and a half. The pure novelty of the job-terrorism modeling-combined with a decent paycheck was good enough to sustain me for the first few months of the job. Then I started to get more and more bored and uninspired at work. I started to forget (not that I ever had a clear idea) about the inspiration I held in school to do something meaningful and engaging with my life. Just as I was just starting to realize that something needed to change, I moved to Oregon to support Sjona in her graduate studies. This past 8 months or so has been the most testing of my life. With the exception of some part time work for IPA and a failing internship in Morocco this summer, I have been unemployed and overly anxious. On the bright side, I have done a lot of soul searching (including looking back over this blog) and have decided to pursue an academic career in development economics, starting in the Fall of 2011.

To prepare for this I have been taking some more math courses, studying for the GRE, and exhaustively looking into every conceivable program. While I knew early on that I wanted to pursue a PhD, I was wavering between Geography, Public Policy, and Economics. I finally decided that geography, while interesting, does not have the proper focus for the kind of development I want to study. Geography studies the interaction of humans in their environment, and the spatial element of human activity. I realized that this wasn't good enough for me...the study of development has to start with peoples behavior, and the interaction of that behavior to their environment. Geography only looks at the outcome of their behavior over a physical plane. While space and environment are interesting variables, they are only variables among many others, not a discipline unto themselves. Because economics is essentially a study of the incentives and repercussions of human behavior, anything that affects it can be turned into a variable include space.

I thought about Public Policy for a while, it has the advantage of being more applied and contextual than economics. While I think I would enjoy a pub pol program more than econ, I think it would limit my career options.

So now it is down to economics. Half of the programs are applied (which I would prefer because of the focus on micro). Most programs are really competitive, none of the regular econ programs i am applying to are better than top 50.

So this was a very brief update, there is a lot more to say. I hope to treat this as mainly a diary blog, although I also want to aggregate all my essays posted to Baha'i Coherence at some point. As always, I am going through a lot, I wouldn't want it all to be forgotten. Remembering the past is an important way to understand and reconcile with the present, as I have found recently