1. Where did you do your internship and what was your role?
I did my internship at the Toulouse School of Economics and I worked as a Research Assistant for Pepita Miquel-Florensa. I helped her with a project which aims to analyse Costa Rica’s coffee sector in order to study buyers’ decisions. I was in charge of cleaning different survey and census data. I also created a database of Costa Rica’s coffee cooperatives. Basically, my work was centred on treating the data using STATA and Excel.
2. How did your studies at TSE help you during the internship?
My studies at the TSE helped me because they gave me the necessary economic interpretation and practical skills for the tasks. I was using STATA almost all the time. Therefore, all the courses which included practical lessons with this software (e.g. econometrics and applied econometrics) were really useful. In particular, the course of Panel Data because almost all the databases I worked with were panels. Moreover, running the STATA code is not the most important thing but rather being able to interpret or understand the results you get
3. How did you get the internship? What would be your advice for students looking for a similar internship?
Since I wanted to do public policy and development, I looked for different professors in these areas at the TSE. I found Pepita Miquel-Florensa’s webpage, I saw that her field of research could be interesting for me and I sent her an email. Therefore, I recommend directly contacting researchers that work in areas you like. Moreover, regularly check the TSE Alumni website since there are offers for research assistant positions.
