Advice for lost graduate students

Ariel Rubinstein gives some entertaining advice for grad students in econ which might apply to music as well:

Do not attend too many seminars in your own field. Otherwise you may simply end up adding a comment to the existing literature, which is mostly made up of comments on previous comments which were themselves only marginal comments….

If you don’t have a good idea, then keep going. Don’t stop at less than 60 single-spaced pages. Nobody will read your paper in any case so at least you have a chance to publish the paper in QJE or Econometrica.

If you have a really good idea, my advice is to limit yourself to 15 double-spaced pages. I have not seen any paper in Economics which deserved more than that and yours is no exception.   

Read the whole thing (pdf). It’s not that long.

h/t Julia Laylander