MQM-RA-Kickoff-2024

Students
Intro Meeting for Research Opportunities within the MQM program 2024
Author

Mike Aguilar

Published

November 5, 2024

What

I offer an RA program, the goal of which is to provide young analysts a space to

  • further your education, and

  • publicize yourselves professionally.

There is no monetary compensation.

There is no course credit.

This is entirely voluntary.

Who

Fuqua MQM students

Examples

  • Check out this market observatory page for a few examples of recent work
  • Most common deliverables:
    • short posts on LinkedIn
    • data viz with R Shiny / Tableau

5-3-1 method to finding a research topic

  • 5: Come up with 5 ideas. These are general ideas, not precise research questions.
  • 3: Set up a meeting with me. You pitch each of the 5 ideas. We cull that list down to 3.
  • 1: You do some reading and preliminary research on those 3 ideas. You put together one-pagers on each. We meet, vote, and pick the final topic. One pagers should contain:
    1. Question,
    2. Data,
    3. Method,
    4. Deliverable,
    5. Intellectual Alpha

Getting to work

  • Set a timeline.
  • Work backwards and set milestones.
  • Weekly email status report to me.
  • Meetings upon completion of milestones / as needed.

Time Commitment

  • As much or as little as you want.
  • Caveat: Be respectful of my time and your teammates’ time.
  • The best projects are usually spread over 1-2 terms. An hour or two each weekend, reduce efforts around exams, extra efforts between terms and at beginning of term when workload is low.

What makes a good project (for this exercise)

  • Aligned with your interests
  • Aligned with career goals and how you want to market yourself.
  • Feasible in time frame
  • Have 3-4 people working together (more productive, more motivation, more fun)
  • Leverage fixed costs.
    • Eg develop an app based on weekly data.
    • Build the app.
    • Write about that.
    • Then rerun the app on new data each week and write short interpretation pieces.
    • Shiny apps are great for this.

How put on resume (not mutually exclusive)

  • List under current research. Title, etc…can list me as advisor.
  • List as research (or “project”). Cite me as research advisor.
  • Only list on profile after I’ve approved. This holds true even for simple posts like “I’m very excited to be working with Prof. Aguilar this semester on XXX project”.
  • Cannot list as “experience”. Doing so would require a much greater labor effort than you have available.

Next Steps

  1. Pick your own team of 3-5 classmates
  2. Come up with 5 ideas of your own choosing
  3. Book a meeting with me (mike.aguilar at duke.edu) whenever is convenient for you