ITFD => Harvard

Congratulations to Edoardo Campanella (ITFD 2009/10), who just won admission to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. After the year in Barcelona, Edoardo went off to work, first for the WTO in Geneva, then as an economic advisor for the Italian Senate after graduating with a Master's degree from ITFD. He has also been a prolific commentator and writer on economic issues.  The MPA he is now going for is one of the most competitive and prestigious postgraduate programs in the world, designed for people who want to work in the highest levels of public administration. For example, the German government sends a handful of the best graduates from the German National Honors Foundation to this program through the McCloy program every year. 

The reigns of power...

pass to Fernando Broner at the end of the month - I am stepping down as the director of the ITFD Master. Fernando has been the deputy director for most of the last 3.5 years. Time whizzed by rather quickly -- it seems like yesterday that we planned the program in 2007, and started in 2008-09 with 18 students. In September, we will probably have 40 or so, from all over the globe. Less apparent from the outside, perhaps, is that we have a bit of a special governance structure, with a steering committee of four academics (Fernando, Jaume Ventura, Antonio Ciccone, me) setting the broad academic path, and the director being in charge of implementation and day-to-day running of the program. From my perspective, the structure has worked well, and fine-tuning over the years has made the master a lot stronger.

One of the pleasures of the job is keeping in touch with alumni, and following their trajectories. Just recently, I heard from Antonella Liberatore (who now has a permanent position at the Economic Research and Statistics Division of WTO in Geneva) and Jasper Hamerlynck (VP at the Institutional Equity Division of Morgan Stanley). If any ITFD students are reading this - do drop us a line, or even better, drop in when you are in town!

'tis the season ... for peddling PhDs

What does faculty do all day? I know it's a question many students wonder about. In addition to running ITFD, the department made me placement officer for the graduating PhD students. This means three things - organizing trial job talks and mock interviews, answering emails of the kind "who are you top candidates in IO and micro? which Canadians from your department (...) should we hire independent of field?", as well as sending unsolicited emails to all and sundry telling them how great our graduates are. This, plus a few dozen small administrative things, like making sure that the website for the jobmarket candidates looks ok.

After all this activity, we are now anxiously waiting for the results... this is how parents must feel when the report card arrives. We have 8 PhD candidates on the market. Combined, they have 43 interviews at this stage, or more than 5 each. Quite a few places still have to decide, others will have a second round of decisions, so I am hopeful that this will be a pretty good year. As always, the response is uneven. [update - the final number in late December was 101 interviews for 8, or more than 12 per head] Finance candidates are doing particularly well, with 15 and 10 interviews for two candidates, plus one early flyout. I am reasonably pleased with the quality of places calling, too -- the top always matters more than the average in this game - and this year our candidates already got calls from Berkeley, Northwestern, Harvard Business, Stanford GSB, UCSD, Bocconi, Warwick, Carlos III, CEMFI plus assorted central banks. Fingers crossed for this year's PhDs!

congratulations

It's a tough job market out there. That's why it is very nice to see that our students are doing well, despite the headwinds. Clara Sofía Gómez Botero (ITFD 09-10) just got appointed as advisor to the Colombian Deputy Minister for Housing. I am particularly pleased since Clara and her team showed a lot of feel for the policy process in developing countries like Colombia as part of their policy memorandum exercise (which focused on social insurance and indirect labor costs). Good luck to you!