Undergrad Lab
In 2023, I co-founded the Undergraduate-Graduate Economic Research Lab at UC San Diego. I also served as its director from 2023–2025. The lab connects motivated undergraduates with graduate students working on active research projects. Our goal is to give undergraduates early, meaningful exposure to academic research while helping graduate students get support on data cleaning, literature reviews, and preliminary analysis.
Since its launch, the lab has:
- Paired hundreds of undergraduates with graduate mentors
- Helped students develop technical skills in Python, Stata, and R
- Created a pathway for students to pursue honors theses, pre-doctoral positions, and PhD programs
Many participating students have gone on to pursue graduate training or research assistant roles at leading institutions.
Mentorship
In addition to directing the lab, I also supervised my own research team within it. Across ten academic quarters, I worked with 58 undergraduate research assistants, many of whom stayed with me until graduating.
During weekly meetings, I provided training in research skills, followed up with each RA on assigned tasks, and provided career and grad school advice. Undergraduates on my team learned how to create maps in QGIS, clean and analyze data in Stata and R, and most recently, how to use AI to generate usable data from historic documents.
They often worked in small groups of 3–4 on an early-stage research idea of mine, working throughout the quarter to clean and analyze data, and ending the quarter with a presentation on their progress to the rest of our team.
I served as a job reference for many former RAs and wrote letters for several. Students I wrote letters for went on to masters programs at Columbia, Cornell, and UCSD.
