Please feel free to add to this! It's a good start, but needs more material for students that are just starting in our program:
The department web page has useful material. See in particular https://cssh.northeastern.edu/economics/phd-program-guidelines/. Every student should read this once a year.
Students will be assigned a PhD student mentor in the fall of their first year. This will help integrate new students, particularly in their first year. The assignment process has been handled by Rick Paulsen and Arvind Sharma in the past. PhD students handling orientation should be involved in the process.
Students' faculty mentors include primarily the PhD program director, but also include the TA and RA supervisors, their classroom instructors, and most importantly their dissertation advisor. Any student can speak to the PhD program director to arrange an introduction to faculty they have not met through one of the channels, including faculty outside of the economics department.
Students should attend research seminars whenever possible. You will see that research active faculty members always attend. They understand that reading papers and attending seminars is the best way to learn. They are even more valuable for students who still need to learn how to evaluate the quality of research. The seminar need not be in your field to be a valuable learning opportunity.
Students at the dissertation stage of their PhD must attend at least one dissertation workshop (the department currently has two, IO and labor, except in the summer when they are combined). These workshops are where students present preliminary research, and where students practice their job market talks. These are wonderful learning experiences for all PhD students, including first and second year students. Students are expected to present regularly in these workshops.
Proposing a dissertation happens following completion of coursework and exams. It should be approximately one year after finishing your coursework requirements and passing your field exams (if required). Proposals must be with two years of completing your coursework. This is a university rule.
Here is a description of where you need to be with your research to be ready to propose a dissertation. Assuming you plan to write a dissertation with three substantive chapters, each modeled after a journal article, you should have one chapter in draft form that includes data and preliminary findings. You should have two other chapters in abstract form. For these, you have a clear research question, you should have collected much of the data, and you should be prepared describe how propose to answer the research question (the empirical strategy). Students may write theoretical chapters as well, but this is uncommon.
Your advisors (faculty in your research field) will help you determine when you are ready to propose. At the time of the proposal, you should have a dissertation committee picked out. A committee consists of a chair and two or three additional committee members. One of those committee members may come from outside of the department/university. Choosing a committee is a two-way process. You should talk to your committee chair or the PhD program director about which other faculty to include as committee members.
As you look to complete your PhD here at Northeastern University, it is important that you are aware of the timeline and appropriate steps to completion. In thinking about completing the PhD, a useful exercise is to work backwards. Completing your PhD comes with 2 goals: graduating and getting a job. Graduation typically takes place in May, although you can also graduate in December or August. Academic jobs start in August, and non-academic jobs can start slightly sooner. Here are some things to consider when working toward these goals:
To participate in the PhD hooding ceremony, you must defend your dissertation by early April of the year in which you want to graduate.
Jobs with summer start dates start being posted in September or October of the preceding year. Deadlines on those applications are typically in November. To successfully graduate with a job in hand, you need to be ready to apply for jobs by the start of the school year in which you seek to graduate.
You will need a number of items prepared to submit in job applications, but the most important step in being ready to apply for jobs is having proposed your dissertation and having completed a job market paper. The job market paper is typically the first and strongest chapter of your dissertation. This needs to be in complete and polished by September of the year you seek to graduate. It is important to have proposed in advance of entering the job market because you will not have a lot of time to work on your dissertation while searching for jobs.