EA - Writing About My Job(s): Research Assistant at World Bank / IMF by geoffrey

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Writing About My Job(s): Research Assistant at World Bank / IMF, published by geoffrey on September 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is actually about two distinct roles at international organizations. If there's one thing you take away from this, it's that Research Assistant roles at policy organizations can vary a lot!I'll abbreviate Research Assistant as RA throughout.My Current Role at World Bank DIMEOne is a job I currently hold as a RA at World Bank DIME, an impact evaluation and research unit. I assist on a research project whose ideal goal is publication in a top journal. This includes data cleaning, analysis, scripting, checking data quality, running regressions, offering suggestions in analysis calls, figuring out what the Principal Investigators want, and so forth. It's very close to an academic "predoc" Research Assistant role that students do between undergrad / Master's programs and PhDs.The project revolves around development economics and causal inference, with a focus on infrastructure and structural transformation. It's a blend of policy, research, development, impact evaluation and growth-adjacent topics.My Previous Role at International Monetary Fund (IMF)The other is a job I formerly held as a Research Assistant at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). I pilot-tested a software tool for better forecasting and data management. This included quality assurance testing, data migration, data entry, and scripting. My RA role was about as opposite from research as you could get and the tasks I was given was quite unconventional. The day-to-day was closer to that of a Quality Assurance Engineer or Data Engineer.The project revolved around macroeconomics and international finance, with a focus on how to best organize data for scenario planning and technical assistance. It's a blend of public finance, debt sustainability, fiscal policies, natural resource policies, and international macro.BackgroundI currently work at World Bank DIME, an impact evaluation and research unit. I've only been here a few months, starting from July 2023. Before that, I worked at the IMF for about a year. Prior to both roles, I did a Master's degree in International Economics and Finance at Johns Hopkins SAIS, a policy school in Washington DC. Before that, I was a Software Engineer for 4 years and before that I was teaching myself to code after a very unsuccessful post-college job search. I am strongly considering an academic career in economics and may apply to Econ PhDs next year. But I am also considering non-academic roles in development, and also PhDs in other fields like Public Policy, Statistics, and Political Economy.I went into the Master's program after many unsuccessful attempts to switch into development work. I had no exact plan coming in but I chose this program in particular because of:It was a 1-year program, which meant less tuition and less foregone earnings.International Economics sounded close enough to Development Economics that I thought I'd be learning similar stuff. (It's very different! International Economics is more macro and finance. Development Economics is more applied micro and impact evaluation).I saw my program had high placement rates in the IMFI wanted to explore the "working on growth is better than global health" argument a bit more and thought, "What better way than by working on macroeconomics?"At the time, I thought Econ PhDs didn't influence policy much, that they were beyond my abilities, and that I wouldn't really like it. All three turned out to be false once I started taking classes. While I was still interested in macro-finance policy, I found myself being more interested in the development research focus so I pivoted my focus towards that. In the Spring, I applied for a mix of academic and policy predocs...