J-PAL Reviews

There is a reason why people do not do this for their entire life. The organization requires constant work, gives little feedback and largely leaves RA's alone to fend for themselves, except when in emergencies it sends more senior staff to babysit them. There is no work life balance and very little contact with research. It is a lot of busy work, and I feel that many new comers are not accustomed to this kind of work. The salaries, benefits and balance aren't good enough to encourage more mature applicants.

- Global positions are a little better-treated than positions with the regional offices. The former are better paid, have access to MIT's amazing ecosystem, access to great benefits (again, through MIT), slightly more reasonable work culture (things usually die down by 6:30pm) and can even get more facetime with the "famous" PIs like Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. Regional office positions (J-PAL LAC, South Asia, Africa, Europe, SE Asia), instead, are relatively underpaid, overworked (late late hours are normalized - 8pm, 9pm at the office), and sometimes isolating (e.g. if you're working alone on a project in a remote part of the country). That said, regional office positions (field positions) are probably much more valuable to growing your skill set - you learn a LOT more by facing the challenges (of which there are many!) of running an RCT on the ground. - Parallel track: to PhD or not to PhD. Many people use J-PAL as a springboard into their own PhD programs. As such, they accept low pay and hard working conditions in order to get a letter of recommendation from their PI. For those not intending to do a PhD, career progression can be vague or absent. - Professor-managers: This is changing somewhat, with the introduction and beefing up of middle management positions. But PIs still act as the ultimate "bosses" of J-PAL and this can be problematic. You have to realize that, often, these are people who have never left a university setting - as such, they're often not great managers. They may have unreasonable expectations, they might forget to think about your career development and training, they might also be insensitive or harsh in their emails. A big part of the job is "managing upwards", since many of these PIs are, well, a little "disconnected" from the realities of the workplace, to put it mildly.