What are the responsibilities and job description for the Quantitative Research Assistant position at Babson College?
Duties & Responsibilities:
Professor Eric Chan is looking for a research assistant interested in learning about academic research in applied microeconomics and public policy. This role is particularly suited for someone who would be genuinely interested in topics of inequality as it pertains to education, housing, and labor, and wish to grow their skills in data collection, cleaning data, visualizing data, and analyzing data for academic research.
Professor Eric Chan is looking for a research assistant interested in learning about academic research in applied microeconomics and public policy. This role is particularly suited for someone who would be genuinely interested in topics of inequality as it pertains to education, housing, and labor, and wish to grow their skills in data collection, cleaning data, visualizing data, and analyzing data for academic research.
The student will be expected to:
- Meet weekly with supervisor
- Script/code data cleaning and analysis in Stata and/or R
- Conduct and write literature reviews and pre-analysis plans
- Be comfortable with multi-tasking, revising tasks, and constructive feedback
- Learn new technological and critical thinking skills
- Have a good attitude about taking on challenging and/or mundane tasks
- Be able to work independently and be a self-learner
Depending on the needs and student’s skills, example projects may include:
- Manual gathering or automated collection of web-based data.
- Doing web research and perusing scholarly literature.
- Cleaning of raw data to assess missing and/or unusual patterns in data.
- Working to perfect aesthetically-pleasing graphs and tables.
- Run regression-based analysis on cleaned data and interpret outputs with guidance.
Qualifications:
This position first requires familiarity with scripting/coding statistical analysis, especially with regression. It is highly preferable for the student to have skills in Stata - though those with relatively high comfort with R may also be seriously considered.
Other desired attributes:
- Ability to handle multiple tasks and deadlines.
- Frustration will be a part of the steep learning process. Student must be willing to learn and adapt, be able to work independently (remotely, as there is not physical space), and be willing to ask for help when necessary.
- Two highly desirable skills: if student has abilities in Python, and/or knows how to scrape websites. Or if student has abilities with GIS software (i.e., QGIS, ArcGIS).
Hours: Be available to work 5-10 hours per week, with an expected average of 7 hours. This may vary somewhat week-to-week depending on responsibilities. We can work together around exam/class schedules, but student must be proactive in communicating their schedules.
