International Women's Day: Interview with Jamie Emery

The Interview

 Jamie, you have certainly gone places since you left UVic as a BSc Honours student. My first question is, how did you choose UVic and specifically, Economics?

I came to UVic to play field hockey. UVic has a very good team. I was enrolled in general studies when I started undergrad and was mostly focussed on field hockey for the first two years. So, I really didn’t come in thinking I would study ECON and neither did I think that my degree would become my number one focus, which in hindsight is pretty funny given that now I have dedicated my entire adult life to studying economics.

 What attracted you to Economics in general?

I learned early on, starting with my first ECON class at UVic with Emma Hutchinson, that the economics discipline provided a useful tool kit to study some of the most important questions in the world like climate change and the topic I’m most interested in: how can we increase economic opportunities for disadvantaged groups. That’s the question that really motivated me and Economics provides a framework and set of quantitative tools to really start thinking about it. I was also drawn to Economics in comparison to other Social Sciences I took classes in because it’s more of a positive science and less about normative aspects: in ECON it’s “this is what happened, here are the nuances, and how do we think about evaluating all the evidence.”

What keeps you going?

The question of how to improve economic opportunities for disadvantaged groups is something I’m still working on. I hope that one day my work can help inform thoughtful policy design and promote social progress.

You opted for the BSc in Economics and then did the BSc Honours. What are some of your fondest memories in pursuing this program?

If you could go back in time, would you change anything or do you feel like you did the program quite optimally?

Honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing. Maybe I would have taken more MATH classes if I had known that my goal would be to go to graduate school, but it worked out fine without doing that.

I just remember UVic so fondly and particularly the last year in the Honours program. I think that was the biggest reason I decided to do a Master’s in the next year. I feel like I was offered a mini version of graduate school because in your first term you must take those difficult theory courses, and I liked doing that with a small cohort. Some of the people in this cohort are still some of my closest friends today. And then the biggest piece of why I’m still doing graduate studies was the thesis writing component of the Honours program. That’s where you take an idea and talk about it with your professors and classmates and take it from start to finish and I really liked that.

Switching gears a little bit, as a woman in Economics have you sometimes felt like there were obstacles in your studies that seemed to be related to your gender?

I think the biggest thing I’ve had to navigate is just feeling comfortable in very male dominated spaces. Throughout my studies, I’ve always had this instinct that I had to hold my own. From my experience, in every stage of my education (undergrad. Masters, predoc, and now PhD), there always seems to be a gap in confidence between men and women studying Economics. For example, my male colleagues seem to share their thoughts, ask questions in classes and seminars, and speak with professors about their research ideas much more frequently than my female classmates and those types of interactions seem to pay off. In contrast, women (on average) tend to be more hesitant and feel they need to have a very polished thought before sharing it with anyone. Another important piece is the gap in mentorship opportunities. Men seem to be able to form more close relationships to their professors, perhaps because they are more willing to talk to professors but also because there are more male role models.

Accelerate Action is the theme of IWD. Where do you see a need for accelerating action to support women in our undergraduate programs and Economics in general?

I think that female mentorship is super important and there are too few opportunities because of the gender distribution of the faculty in many departments. For example, only around 10% of full professors and 25% of Assistant professors in the top 50 economics departments are women. . Not to say that the male faculty members aren’t also amazing supervisors to female students, but there is a gap in same-sex mentoring which I believe is uniquely important for navigating the discipline as a woman.

Female representation is also important at the undergraduate level because it matters whether you can see yourself in the discipline. I had a good experience with this at UVic: I took my first economics class with Emma [Hutchinson]. Also early on in my studies, I had Dr. Roy [also a woman] for Econometrics and [Elisabeth Gugl] for micro theory and Dr. Welling for ECON313. I actually didn’t realize that there were these big gender gaps, especially in the fields of econometrics and micro theory, because of all the women who taught me these subjects at UVic. This gave me the opportunity to have female role models in the field which is not always the norm. In addition to faculty, also in my first year, I had an amazing female TA in ECON 103 who I looked up to a lot. It really mattered to me to see these women in those spaces and really crushing it.

What did you do after graduating from UVic with a BSc Honours?

I graduated from in Spring 2020, so my time at UVic came to an extremely abrupt and unexpected end. I worked remotely for the Bank of Canada that summer and started my master’s at UBC in the fall. While at UBC, one of my professors flagged the existence of predocs to me and highlighted that they provided a good opportunity to take a break from coursework and apply to PhD programs in the U.S. I did a 2-year Predoc in a lab called Opportunity Insights at Harvard. I then started my Ph.D. at MIT last year [23-24] and I’m now finishing my second year.

You have been very successful in your graduate studies. How much do you feel your undergraduate degree at UVic prepared you for your graduate studies? Anything you would have liked to see more/less of during your time at UVic?

UVic’s BSc Honours program prepared me so well both for the master’s at UBC and for grad school at MIT because of the rigorous sequences in the program. I have taken fewer MATH classes than my classmates [at MIT], but the theory courses in Economics prepared me well for first year coursework. I still have all of my notes from UVic and I referenced them a lot throughout both my master’s and first year PhD coursework. I did not feel like I had any big gaps in preparation relative to my classmates at MIT which says a lot given that most of them attended Ivey league schools for undergrad.

Most importantly, I felt like UVic gave me invaluable independent research experience. The thesis component of the Honours program set me up well both for completing my Master’s thesis and applying for predocs (which requires a writing sample). Now, I have to write a second-year paper, and I feel like ok, I have done this twice before – I can do this!

You have taken on some mentoring yourself. Could you talk a little bit about this?

Yes, I help organize a mentoring program out of MIT, Havard, and Stanford called the Economics Mentoring Program, or EMP. One thing I learned as a pre-doc is just how big the gaps are in knowledge about grad school applications and support while completing them. Some schools give you much more access to this information as an undergraduate compared to other schools where more students from underrepresented backgrounds go. The goal of EMP is to help bridge these gaps in information and support to help diversify the pipeline into economics PhD programs.

The EMP matches students from underrepresented backgrounds with a graduate student mentor from one of the three departments (Harvard, MIT, Stanford) and you have one-on-one mentoring sessions. A lot of the mentees in the program are currently applying to grad school, so we do things like read their statement of purpose, provide feedback on application materials, and answer any questions about the application process. We’re also trying to target the program to earlier in the pipeline, so that mentors can give advice on earlier stage things like opportunities to gain research experience and what courses to take before applying for grad school. We also provide information about economics research and life as a PhD student more generally for students who are still deciding whether a PhD in economics is the right choice for them.

Jamie, thank you so much for talking to us and it’s great to see you give back through the EMP. We’re very proud of you at UVic and it’s always great to catch up and see what you’re up to next.