Quote:
Originally Posted by unitroot
Most RA tasks assigned to undergraduates (and even beginning graduate students) are boring tasks like formating or manipulating data, and such. It's boring and takes a long time, plus you hardly learn anything new. I wouldn't continue it after the summer unless it's a truly interesting project.
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Learning how to prepare data for analysis is a really important skill, and one that is more efficiently learned through RA work than on your own time, on your first independent research project! Cleaning, reshaping, and merging data are non trivial and essential skills for anyone who intends to do empirical work. I think people who start graduate school directly from undergrad especially underestimate the importance of this skill and the prominent role it will play in their future time allocation. If you spend most of your time in an RA job preparing data, well, that's because you are highly likely to spend most of your time in our own research preparing data. Unless you are working with only single, well-established, well-cleaned, self-contained data for the remainder of your career, learning to prepare data is a great use of your time and will make it much easier to hit the ground running with your own research.
That said, a good boss will involve a capable RA in data analysis, preparing and writing up tables, and other parts of the research process as well. Of course, this has to be scaled to your training in econometrics and statistics.
Doing research, though, involves a number of skills that aren't taught at any point in the PhD process. IMO, the
best way to learn how to do research is to immerse yourself in someone else's research by being an RA. Even if you wind up doing what unitroot describes as boring and time-consuming, you will be learning how to do things that are necessary for your own research! Boring and time-consuming doesn't mean obvious, and by doing RA work, you will be come much more adept and efficient at important skills you would otherwise have to learn on your own as you attempt your first research projects in grad school.