As the school year kicks off & grad students start signing up to see profs, here are some thoughts about planning your research.

To me, the 2 questions PhD students ought to ask themselves:

1. How will this research change people's beliefs?
2. Who are those people?

These are probably the two questions I ask students again and again, and it leads to better research.

This is certainly true with empirical research. Students are consumed with credible causality. So they get really excited when they think about a way to identify something.

But often, others already buy their hypothesis. So the study is unlikely to change beliefs. Sure we might learn something from checking. But a study, or at least a dissertation, needs to have a big ex-ante capacity to surprise us or change our minds about something important.

Sometimes the answer is "but we don't know the magnitude". And that's a good reason to run a study. But then you better believe your estimates will be precise and your external validity is huge.

Then you need to think about whose minds you are changing. If you can't name 10 smart people in the profession who would change how they write about the subject after reading your results, then you either need to learn the field better or widen your appeal.

A good way to get tenure is for people to be able to say "before X came along, we thought about one way. After this body of work, we now think another way." Your dissertation is your first step on that path.

IN other words, whatever kind of work you do, I think the job of a junior academic is to try to change the way everyone thinks about your area of study. As a first year prof, that's what my sr colleagues told me to aim for. And it was good advice.

Before hearing that, I thought the secret was to simply do something technically new, or really clever, and that the sum of many claver things was enough. Often it is. But I think the real way to contribute to the field is to be cumulative, and change the conversation.

Personally, I also encourage students to be bold and take big risks, especially early in the PhD. Don't be afraid to try to collect data no one has ever thought about, or bound into new questions and fields. Probably your interest is either shared or infectious.

What about you? What advice do you find yourself giving over and over and over again?