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- Getting out ready: start here
- Is industry right for you?
- Roles and who hires economists
- The five-year timeline
Build your proof
Be memorable
Communicate like industry
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Interviews
- How industry interviews work
- Behavioral interviews
- Technical interviews
- Coding and SQL
- Your research and interview day
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Other path
During the PhD · Be memorable
Your brochure: show what you can do
Most people you meet will never sit through your presentation. Give them something they can hold, scan in thirty seconds and keep.
Many PhD students prepare for a non-academic event the way they would for an academic conference: they bring their research poster, large and full of equations, regression tables and dense text. It is an understandable instinct, and it rarely works. Most people at these events will never stop to listen to your presentation. What they need is something cool you uncovered, shown simply, with the impact explained in plain words. Everything else you can say later to the technical person who wants it.
An academic poster is designed for academics who stop, read for ten minutes and ask about your standard errors. At a non-academic event, almost nobody does that. People walk past, glance, and decide in a second or two whether you are worth talking to. A wall of equations tells them not to stop.
What works instead is a short brochure: a small, well-designed piece that shows what you do and what you can do for someone, that a person can scan in thirty seconds and take with them. It is your pitch on paper. It keeps working after the conversation ends, when the person is back at their hotel trying to remember who you were.
What goes in it
Be creative with the format. It can be a single page, a bifold or a tri-fold, and it can have real design: color, a strong image, a layout that looks like you made it on purpose. This is one of the few places in a PhD where you get to think about design, and many students discover they enjoy it. That is worth discovering; visual communication is a valued skill in industry. Whatever format you choose, everything on it should pass one test: would someone outside economics understand it and find it interesting?
Your name and a one-line description of what you do
Not your title. A line that says what you can do: “Economist who measures what pricing changes actually do to customers.”
One or two cool findings
The thing that would make someone say “really?” Each finding gets one headline sentence and one clear, simple chart. The chart title states the conclusion, not the topic: “Free-shipping thresholds raise order sizes by 15%,” not “Order values by shipping policy.”
Why it matters
Two or three sentences on who could use these results and how. Connect it to business, policy or people’s lives, with numbers where you can.
What you can do
A short list of the problems you can solve, written as outcomes rather than methods. “Measure whether a promotion actually increased sales” is better than “causal inference.” “Forecast demand by store and week” is better than “time-series modeling.”
A QR code and your contact details
The QR code should open your portfolio website, where the technical person can find the full paper, the code and your resume. Add your email and LinkedIn. Test the QR code on two different phones before you print anything.
What to leave out
Equations, regression tables, literature, acronyms, the name of your estimator and anything that requires an economics course to understand. All of that belongs on your website, one scan away, for the person who wants it. The brochure’s only job is to make someone want to know more.
Before and after
A large academic poster titled “Heterogeneous Treatment Effects of Minimum Wage Increases on Establishment-Level Labor Demand,” with six regression tables, an event-study plot and a paragraph on identifying assumptions.
A tri-fold titled “What really happens when the minimum wage goes up.” Inside: one chart showing restaurants cut hours, not jobs; two sentences on what that means for owners and workers; four things the author can analyze for a business; a QR code to the full paper.
Practical details
Print a modest number, enough for the people you plan to meet plus a few extra. Have a PDF version ready to attach when you follow up by email, and a version that looks good on a phone screen for when someone asks you to send it right away. Free design tools have good templates to start from. Experiment, and then ask a few people outside economics which version catches their eye. Design should make the message easier to read, never harder: creative is good, cluttered is not.
Bring it to every conference, career fair and informational meeting. When you meet someone, have the conversation first and hand over the brochure at the end: “Here’s a one-page summary, and the QR code has everything else.” It gives them a reason to remember you and a way to find you again.