Booking a Flight to Chicago, Talking to Seminar Speaker, and Criticized by Public Health Researcher

Book a return flight ticket from London to Chicago to attend the ASSA meeting in early January. I may not get any job interview offers at the ASSA meeting, but booking a flight just before the meeting is risky.

Talk to today's seminar speaker visiting LSE (see 5 October). Although my job market paper is not relevant to his research, he says it's interesting and he understands why I'm on the job market with this paper. That's a good sign, isn't it? He also asks me about other projects in my dissertation, and I talk about the ethnic conflict project. He says the empirical result (ethnic groups losing power suffer in terms of infant mortality) is interesting, but he asks a question of why this is so. That's a fair point and I need to think about it harder.

Attend LSHTM's public health lecture on sanitation and hygiene. After the lecture is over, I talk to the lecturer for asking some questions related to my job market paper. A logical progression is that I talk about my job market paper to this lecturer. She's very skeptical on my findings, making me think harder about my paper.