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.
One 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.
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.
I 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:
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. I landed the RA role at the IMF, found it wasn’t the best fit for me, and then got the RA role at World Bank DIME where I’m working now.
That’s a quick and stylized summary of the journey. Excluded here, mostly for my own sanity, is the hundreds of job rejections I faced over the past decade. There is a tremendous amount of luck, competition, and prestige-bias in getting a role like mine. I don’t know if I’d recommend my own path to many others and if I knew how much time and energy it would take, I’m unsure if I would have embarked in the first place.
There's a lot of information online about how to get an econ RA job (such as this one) so I won't talk too much about this. But one thing I will emphasize is to apply very early. Start checking deadlines now if you're considering this for 2024 summer or fall. Even if you don’t land a job in the Fall cycle, you’ll have a better idea of what to do for the Spring hiring cycle. Interviewers evaluate you on some outside-the-classroom knowledge and judgment calls with their data tasks and interviews. Getting practice with these is useful.
Large agencies to tend have standardized procedures with early deadlines. (I missed the hiring cycles for the Federal Reserve Board and World Bank DIME deadlines in my first RA search.)
For the IMF, you submit a single job application that then gets viewed by multiple departments. If you already reside in the DC area, you can apply year-round. If you reside elsewhere, there’s a deadline which I’m less familiar with. If a department likes your application, they’ll choose you for an interview. From there, it’s up to the department how they conduct the process. My Master’s degree is highly valued at the IMF, so I ended up with 5 different interviews in a single month. My classmates had similar stories.
The World Bank is decentralized in its hiring processes, so I don’t know anything about how hiring works outside my unit. I know of two RAs who got their jobs through connections, one who was highly recommended by a SAIS professor and another who was highly recommended by a Fed Economist. My unit in particular does have a standardized hiring process and should be putting up applications soon.
In academia, a RA is someone who works under a professor for 1-3 years before doing a PhD. In economics, this includes data cleaning and exploratory analyses in service of an academic publication.
At policy organizations like think tanks, multilaterals, and government agencies, the role is still a time-limited role done before a PhD. But the responsibilities are broader and overlaps with “policy”. I put that in quotes because “policy” itself is a broad term but loosely speaking, you’ll usually be assisting economists on data-oriented tasks that are more “operationally relevant” rather than “publication focused”. (This wording is shamelessly stolen by a bureaucrat who prefaced they were trying to be delicate when asking me about my job.)
The upside is exposure to technocratic policy-making. Some lessons I’ve learned:
The downside is that the analytical challenge and skill development of your job can vary a lot. This came as an enormous surprise in my IMF job. I figured that ~25% of my time would be on a policy research project of some kind. I ended up doing little of this, though partly this was because I never took any initiative to partner with an economist which was partly because I ended up not developing a strong interest in macro-finance. The project I was hired for did have an interesting mission, but ultimately didn't develop the skills I wanted. My current role at DIME has been the opposite of that.
Overall, I would frame policy RA roles as trading off between tasks that have “operational relevance” versus a “publications focus”. If you care a lot about potentially having an ambitious academic career, you’ll probably want to get a RA role with a “publications focus”, as the PhD admissions process cares about letters from active researchers. These are much less common, as research departments are a small part of policy organizations and may not even exist in the first place. If you’re feeling undecided on academic research or leaning more towards stuff with immediate relevance, you'll probably get better career development with the faster pace and quicker deadlines in roles leaning towards “operational relevance”.
That said, switching departments within an organization after a year or two or experience is doable, as you’ll be a known quantity with less risk than an outside hire. However, this probably varies by organization and the role you want to switch into.
Overall, I love my job. I’ve found the pros to outweigh the cons. While my job is not yet leading research, my experience feels very similar to what Kevin Kuruc described in his blog post, "Writing about my job: Economics Professor". (I also reused a lot of wording and formatting from that post.) Being able to shift around my work hours as needed is a big perk and I don’t have much of a taste for things that require money. I also find I’m developing more transferable career capital (that is, skills that would be good in other roles) than I initially thought. Mostly, that's liking the job a lot, wanting to be very good at it, and thus trying to excel at the soft skills that every job benefits from.
My current philosophy to careers is building skills and experience since most people have their biggest social impact in their mid-to-late career. High personal fit means this is plausibly where I’d have the most impact even though I'm highly uncertain on the value of research (and academic research in particular).
At the same time, I’m also realizing the skills that help me succeed in empirical research also would help me elsewhere. These projects are increasingly done in large teams where partnerships, initiative, and a general entrepreneurial spirit is useful. The world in which I'd good at this kind of research is probably also a world where I'd be good at working / founding a startup. There's also returning to software engineering doing direct work and/or earning-to-give.
But for now, I’m spending the next 1-2 years being the best at my job as I possibly can and doing some informational interviews to see what other options there are for me.
I am more than happy to give advice. My one request is to skim the following before reaching out:
This is an excellent post!
I really like seeing profiles of jobs that are closer to being "entry-level" for classic EA-flavored career tracks, to give people a better sense of what they'll be doing early on (it's common for other things, like the 80K podcast or EAG talks, to be focused on work from more senior people).