Season of Dread
How to Write a Job Market Paper and Live to Tell About It
Spooky season is here—and so is the launch of Talk at the Top, with a pilot episode on the real horror of finishing an economics PhD: writing your job market paper.
It’s spooky season. 🎃
The leaves are changing. The days are getting shorter. The ghosts are emerging.
And somewhere in an economics department, a PhD student has just opened the latest version of their job market paper and thought:
“I have made a terrible mistake.”
What better time, then, to launch Talk at the Top, a new podcast from Standard Error about the unwritten rules of academic research, writing, and publishing?
Our pilot episode, “Season of Dread: How to Write a JMP and Live to Tell About It,” is now available, hosted by Samantha Eyler-Driscoll, Standard Error founder and lead editor, and Olivier Simard-Casanova, Standard Error partner and researcher.
The scariest thing about the job market paper
Writing a job market paper is frightening for reasons that have very little to do with the quality of your research.
A JMP isn’t just another paper. It is supposed to demonstrate who you are as a researcher to people who may eventually become your colleagues. It needs to showcase your ability to ask an interesting question, make a contribution, execute good research, and—crucially—figure out what is worth saying and how to say it.
No pressure.
And yet much of the knowledge required to do all of this is tacit. Graduate students are often expected to know how to write a compelling JMP without ever being explicitly taught what makes one compelling.
So in our pilot episode, Samantha and Olivier talk about some of the things that can make the process feel particularly terrifying:
- treating your JMP like any other academic paper;
- waiting until October to start figuring out what your paper is actually about;
- trying to make the paper do absolutely everything;
- writing backward from the presentation, model, or results;
- failing to define the limits of your argument;
- forgetting that a JMP is fundamentally a rhetorical exercise; and
- failing to think carefully about what your particular audience will find interesting.
They also talk about feedback, revision, and why getting another set of expert eyes on your writing can help you see problems that are nearly impossible to see when you’ve been staring at the same document for six months.
Welcome to the haunted house
At Standard Error, we spend a lot of time thinking about the things researchers are expected to know but aren’t necessarily taught.
How do you know when a claim is too strong? How much context does your reader need? What makes an introduction work? How do you distinguish an interesting contribution from an impressive pile of results?
These aren’t just questions of grammar or spelling. They’re questions about how academic arguments work—and about the conventions and expectations that govern how researchers communicate with one another.
Talk at the Top is our attempt to make some of that tacit knowledge a little more explicit.
Think of it as a guided tour through the haunted house of academic research.
There will be traps. There will be unexplained conventions. There may be some screaming.
But hopefully, there will also be fewer surprises.
And remember:
The real horror isn’t the job market.
It’s discovering in November that your introduction doesn’t actually say what your paper is about.
Happy spooky season. 👻
