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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud: A podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talked with a GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series, sponsored by the Graduate Centers Office of Career Planning and Professional Development. 

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JACK DEVINE, HOST: Welcome to another edition of Alumni Aloud. We’re here with Eric Osborne. Thank you so much for joining us. 

ERIC OSBORNE, GUEST: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. 

DEVINE: So we like to begin with what you were doing while you were at the CUNY Graduate Center. So what questions drove your research at the CUNY Graduate Center? 

OSBORNE: Economics is maybe a little a little unique in that it is less a kind of, you know, topic in and of itself as as much as it is like a way of a way of looking at the world. So, you know, it often starts out not so much like particular like any sort of particular question, but just learning about how to critically analyze different situations. So you know like I don’t, I don’t know. I think I think most disciplines are like this, where you have rather than like one large story that’s told in in a dissertation, it’s oftentimes a collection of essays, so in Econ, it’s usually a collection of three essays, with the idea being that if you turn in a, you know, 200 page manuscript, it’s probably not going to be read by anyone, but if you if you do, you know 3 70 page things or 60 page things that are more likely to get published or something like that then then maybe they’ll have, They’ll have a larger impact. The actual sort of questions that people tend to study and that I that I studied, you know, they have they have, you know, varying degrees of congruence to them.  

There there’s always, you know, some sort of connecting thread, but that can be you know subject matter, but oftentimes it’s method you know which is which is really more what brought all of my sort of the chapters of my dissertation together and you know the title of my dissertation was, you know, Essays and Applied Microeconomics. So it wasn’t it wasn’t a singular sort of topic. Again, it was ways of looking at the world and allowed me to kind of, you know, look at different questions about things that I cared about would be the, you know, social justice, inequality, mental health and kind of ask different questions about all of those things. So for example, like I said, I care a lot about social justice. I also care a lot about basketball. I’m a huge basketball fan. So one of the chapters I looked at was racial discrimination in professional basketball. So there’s this like this really unique data set that the NBA started putting out in 2015, kind of after some scandals that they’ve had that that looked at the last two minutes of close games and it basically they had this independent body look over all of the calls and they called material non calls. So like where some where the ref like maybe missed the call and to kind of say whether that was correct or incorrect. So that was like a really unique way to look at kind of the racial dynamics in referees, between referees and players. And investigate you know whether you know people have kind of an own race preference, whether they’re more likely to, you know, let players get away with something if they share their own race or get a or to penalize someone more if they if they do not share their share their own race. So that was that was, you know, kind of one of the things that I looked at.  

You know, and then like I said. I care a lot about inequality. I also looked at minimum wage and kind of like second like second tier affects and things like minimum wage. I think like how does it affect the person who’s getting the job and you can also see how it affects things like schooling decision. You know, someone is like a high schooler, more likely to leave school if minimum wages grow up or they’re more likely to stay in school because now it’s harder for them to get that minimum wage job because there’s more, there’s more competition to it. So that’s my long way of saying it’s it’s it’s… there’s a whole host of questions. That were generated from a in a particular way of looking at the world. 

DEVINE: So you didn’t have a singular focus, it was more of you had a unifying methodology and then you looked at these various issues that were of concern to you, things that you care about and things that impact society related to inequality, social justice more broadly, and as a fellow sports fan, I can identify with pursuing and research into something like basketball and the racial bias that could exist within the sport. I think that’s really fascinating research. I’d love to check it out. So when did you first make the decision to pursue a career at Pace University and what steps did you take along your path to end up as an assistant professor? 

OSBORNE: Sure. You know, again, I don’t know like how much commonality there is between various disciplines. I imagine in this respect it’s quite a bit and that there’s you don’t really have much say over like you, you can’t have much locational preference I suppose. So the the job market is very cyclical. It happens once a year. It’s, you know, this year, you know, candidates are going to be going on the market like pretty much right now. And it happens once, you apply. I mean I applied pretty much anywhere that was looking for it an applied micro economists. It ended up being, I don’t know, 220 jobs that I applied to. You know, if you if you really want to have success in the academic job market. You have to have a certain amount of flexibility over where you go, so I will say that when I did it, I got I think so there this happened in rounds. So the first round of interviews you get all happened at the same place, so we have a job market for my year was in San Diego. We all met in San Diego and then I had I think around 22 interviews. And then from there you do fly outs. So then you have your second round and I think I had to read 7 flyouts and then you have your offers after that, so I had three offers by the time I accepted the Pace position. So there you know, I did choose Pace, but there also was a limited selection of things that I had to had to choose from. I will say it was very serendipitous for me though because you know obviously I have roots in the New York City, places in New York City. I have roots in the in the New York City area. My partner lives in New York City and she doesn’t have a career that that lends itself to being outside of like New York or Chicago. Or LA. So it was very serendipitous for me, but uh, but yeah, that’s the process that I that I went through. 

DEVINE: What many academics want to do, what people are getting a PhD, you wanted to become a professor, so you shoot your shot and you kind of apply to over 200 positions trying to figure out what you can do and you’re willing to work anywhere. But fortunately it worked out in the way that you were able to land a job in New York City that you didn’t have to move. You didn’t have to cause any problems with your partner and you’re able to stay and get this assistant professor job in New York. That’s great. Were there any other career paths that you considered? 

OSBORNE: No, there’s no Plan B. There probably should have been. I think anyone in the back of my head, I knew that, you know, I think just through the whole, like, the slog of of Graduate School, the the, like, the possibility that an economics degree is a pretty marketable degree. So if I had to go private sector, I could have done that. Like I could have, you know, gone and. I had friends work for banks or for like major corporations like Amazon or whatever and that was always possible. I I don’t think I would have. It would have taken a lot for me to to end up there. You know, I had friends that that you know they like failed the job market and ended up taking like a visiting position somewhere for a year or two. I probably would have done that, you know, had I failed the job market and then just retried, go back on the market again. Go, go for academia. I don’t know how many cycles I’d have to go through before I quit and go into the private sector. But it would take a couple at least. 

DEVINE: You were all in. You didn’t want to give up on your dream. 

OSBORNE: I was all in. I didn’t apply to any private sector jobs, so it was, I was all in on. Academia there was no alternative route.  

DEVINE: You were going to focus, you were going to get the job and. You did so it all worked out. That’s great. 

OSBORNE: Luckily it did. 

DEVINE:  But as you say like some people who are have their PhD in economics end up working in the private sector banks or like Amazon or the Federal Reserve or something like that, they could go into policy. So there’s, there’s these other alternatives, but you wanted to stay in academia and I think that’s that’s what a lot of people hope for when they’re getting their PhDs so that’s really great that it worked out that way. So what role did the Graduate Center have in your intellectual development, and how did your experiences at the GC transform you into the assistant professor that you are today? 

OSBORNE: It had a big impact, you know, I I will say, you know, I have a lot of appreciation for my mentors there, you know, Mike Grossman and David Yager, Ted Joyce, they they really set a precedent there for just like the way that the graduate students are treated. You know, a lot of graduate programs in economics, they do it like the real attempt, like, there’s a lot of horror stories about it. It’s just being like the the, the, almostlike still to like break you, you know? And like University of Chicago like almost like promotes that sort of that sort of thing. And that was never, that was never that way. It was always very supportive environment that they that they brought the really inspired you to you know to keep going like it’s saying it’s a long process. And and you know you have your highs and your lows and to have have people like that in your supporting you is was really quite big. 

Beyond that, you know there’s a lot of, as someone who always I never wanted to go to like a like a bit like an R1 research institution. I always wanted to go to a teaching school. And that the opportunities to teach are remarkable, being, you know, part of the greater CUNY system. There’s so many opportunities to teach, lots of connections at other schools as well. That was really big for me. Maybe the the biggest, although you know up there anyway, was the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the kind of the preeminent non academic research organization in economics, was for a long time, housed within GC but is in any case still in New York City and until, well, very recently, Mike Grossman, who is a former EO of Economics, he’s was the head of the NBR. So there’s kind of this, this like unspoken connection even after they left after they left GC. And that’s a huge, huge help to to be able to be a research assistant at the at the NBR for aspiring economists. So I couldn’t have picked a better spot to start my career than than GC to be quite honest. 

DEVINE: Unlike the University of Chicago, for example, you don’t get broken down at the Graduate Center. They lift you up. Your advisors are there to support you, make you feel more confident, and yeah, your build up, your character, your ability to do research and writing, but also what’s great about the Graduate Center and similar to my experience is that you get these opportunities to teach in the CUNY system and I’ve been around at a couple of different colleges and kind of working with the students is one of my favorite things that I get to do as a PhD candidate and kind of, that’s you actually feel like you’re like taking what you’re learning and providing it out in the open and helping other people learn more about things, it’s different for. I mean, you’re economics and history, but still we kind of we take the knowledge that we that we’re that we’re getting and then we’re we’re putting it out in the world. So it feels like you’re actually making the impact in that way, which is great. And then you have this other connection to a research institution that used to be housed within the GC, but it’s it’s not academic and it’s located in New York City so you gotta kind of build these connections and and take your research maybe and apply it in other ways. So that’s that’s really great. What were some of the challenges you encountered as you transitioned from Graduate School to your career at Pace University? 

OSBORNE: I think that the biggest challenge, I mean the hardest part about being in GC, I think was the the lack of like not being all like centrally located. You know you have you have your classes you take at the at the the main Grad Center in Midtown, but then you know you have your, your appointments that are like I was at Queens College and then you know, other people like my close friend was at was at one close friend was at Brooklyn, another was at Hunter. And so like, they kind of you had to disperse everyone all around and you kind of kind of felt like there wasn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You weren’t part of the day-to-day what was going on a lot of times. And so when I started at Pace, first of all I started during the pandemic, so it was fully remote for for the first year that I was there, which was very bizarre, but then just, you know, not having not having you know as much input on things like like committees and administration and all that stuff, that was really like I had no experience that a lot of experience with research and teaching, but all of the other stuff that goes along with with the job, I had almost no interaction with because I was, you know, just moving from campus to campus and and didn’t see a lot of the inner workings behind the scenes. So that was that was the the the toughest, the toughest thing again, exacerbated by starting during COVID. That was very weird. I didn’t meet any of my coworkers in person for like 18 months until after you start. 

DEVINE: So at when you’re at the Grad Center, it’s there’s this positive and negative aspect of being at CUNY, where you have all these opportunities at the other colleges and universities within the system to work and teach there. But that means you’re not like, together with the people who are in your cohort all the time, that you’re you’re doing different things and you’re in different places. So that was a challenge while at Graduate School and then following Graduate School you’re trying to like you had that teaching experience. You have the research experience, but you weren’t on committees, so the added responsibilities of being at Pace, of being an assistant professor at a time when you’re starting during COVID you have to work remotely. You don’t get to know people as well as you would like to and kind of integrate your yourself into the department in that way. That poses a real challenge. So, what would you recommend to current graduate students interested in pursuing a career in academia? 

OSBORNE: You know, I would say that for us publications are king, you know, it’s it’s absolutely, you know, when I when I was I taught not only the other CUNY schools, but it, you know, lots of other schools in New York. And I had it like an insane amount of teaching under my belt. I had taught over 30 classes while I was at, I was at GC. So. You know I by the time I was on the market, I’d had as much teaching experience as like any kind of professor at Baruch has after like 7 or 8 years and that helped me for sure. But you know, I look, if you compare like my, uh, like, how many interviews I had job offers compared to people who had, like, almost no teaching but like 1 publication, they did better they they had more success on the on the job market. It’s important to keep in mind that that I think this is this is again it’s especially for econ the publication process takes a long time, so you know I would really focus on getting that first chapter of your dissertation done as quickly as possible so you can get it out to you can get it out to journals, cause the the publication process can take, I mean, I’ve got a paper right now that’s that’s still forthcoming, hasn’t actually been published yet. And it was one of my chapters in my dissertation. So like the publication process contain those five years ago, so that that, I mean that can take it can take a very long time. So get that out, try to have publications under your belt. By the time you hit the job market, you know don’t lose the thread like you’re there to be to learn to be a researcher and be able to prove that is gonna be the most important thing over other things that that can boost your your CV like more teaching experience. 

DEVINE: So you had a lot of teaching experience and prepared you in the next step in your career, but in reality the difference maker in the job market is having those publications. So emphasize work on that. Focus on that. Try to get as much published as possible and understand that the publishing process takes a long time. So you can’t, you can’t really rest on your laurelas and hope you’re gonna get something in at the last minute. You need to be doing it like while you’re in Graduate School. Early on, focusing on getting something out there. I think that makes a lot of sense. Alright. I just want to thank you so much for joining us on Alumni Aloud. It was really great speaking with you and I wish you the best at Pace University and wherever else you end up in your career. 

OSBORNE: Thank you so much for having me. 

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