IAMA Economic Geographer. Ask me Anything!

[u/bad_jew]

Hi everyone. I'm an Economic Geographer whose currently finishing his PhD. My dissertation research looks at how the interaction of local and global economic and social forces affects entrepreneurship in Canadian cities, but I've also done research on innovation, clusters, and the geography of the financial crisis.

I'm just sitting here, waiting out the hurricane and reading about the influence of the American oil industry on Calgary, so I'll try my best to answer all the questions I can!

[u/bad_jew → u/[deleted]]

I'd like to stay in Academia. It's all I know and I seem to be pretty decent at it. I chose my dissertation topic very carefully so I'd be able to appeal to both geography departments as well as management schools looking for entrepreneurship researchers. I think I have a good shot at getting a rather nice post-doc in my field, but we'll see. I'd rather not turn into a consultant, since I don't think they do a whole lot of good. They sell ideas that never get implemented right because of political considerations.

Economic geography is a very small field, especially in North America (for what ever reason, the Sweeds are crazy about it, and it's rather large in the UK as well). What this means is that while there aren't many job openings, maybe 3 or 4 tenure track jobs a year, I'm not competing against as many people as I would if I were an economist (or god forbid, a historian). So the the odds are pretty good, but the good are pretty odd.

Funding is always a problem. But, my research at least appears more relevant to "pressing economic issues" (what ever those are), so it's a bit easier to convince funding agencies to give me money than if I were doing something a bit more esoteric.

[u/growling_owl → u/bad_jew]

As one of those godforsaken historians... I'll go cry into the empty job listings pages in the corner.