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Requirements

Job overview

The advertised position is for a Policy and Research Associate (PRA) at gui2de, the Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development, and Evaluation. gui²de is a university-wide research platform jointly convened by the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Economics Department. Our mission is to address poverty and insecurity in low and middle-income countries by incubating solutions, rigorously testing them in the field, and working with local partners to scale what works. Our work spans faculty affiliates across five Georgetown schools, operational and analytical staff in Washington, DC, and East Africa, and students who work alongside us in the field.

The PRA will work closely with Professor Jishnu Das and other members of the team. We are a small and collaborative group. Our work is built around a weekly group meeting. During the meeting, each team member provides updates on their workstreams, receives feedback from the group, and finalizes tasks for the following week. The meetings are in-person and not optional. Following the meeting, everyone does their own thing–but typically, there are many conversations and ideas bounced around during the week as well. No one is on their own, and everyone is usually a door knock or a phone call away. In general, we also try to do something outside of work once a month.

Very Important: We are looking for someone who will commit to remaining with us for at least 2 years, preferably 3 years. Please consider that commitment seriously at the time of application.

In order to facilitate the best possible match, in what follows we specify the kinds of tasks for which we require support. In general, you need to be independent, passionate about education and health, good at communication and messaging, fantastic at analysis, and happy to travel.

The Basics

We have a portfolio of academic work on health and education at various stages of completion. We do not need you to contribute to these off the bat, but if you are willing to jump in, that’s even better. What we need you to do is several things that complement or build on this work.

Example 1

We have a paper showing how investments in foundational literacy and numeracy increase later-life earnings. You can see presentations of this work here, here, and here. We need to disseminate this well. This means two things:

1. Design, edit, and coordinate public-facing outputs to disseminate our results on FLN. These could be fairly complex things, like whiteboard animations, where you would have to manage a contracted firm.

2. Manage timelines, donor relationships, and deliverables.

3. Perhaps co-author, or solo author, your own writing around these. You could publish these on your own–we have outlets, or perhaps you have your own Substack.

4. Bring in and scrape additional data as necessary to build out these estimates for others.

Example 2

We are planning a multi-institutional collaboration to build a guidance document/website around investing in private schools in low-income countries. Here you would:

1. Manage stakeholders, which includes drafting responses to technical queries on the literature (for instance, we just did power calculations for one group, wrote a note on how to think of surrogate outcomes for another group, etc.)

2. Participate in the writing of the report, or the development of the website, including summaries of the literature, explanations of the work that already exists, scraping new data on private school location, putting together multiple datasets, etc.

3. Prepare and work with a small group on the content of workshops, structure, inputs needed, and outputs produced. Draft the report on the workshops afterwards.

4. Maintain connections and identify avenues for shorter publications, including blogs, articles in outlets like The Conversation, VoxDev, etc.

5. Manage timelines, donor relationships, and deliverables for any funding tied to this project.

Example 3

We are running a winter school camp in Balochistan, in an area where the long break is in the winter. This is a very interesting project, and we have the team mostly in place, so you would ‘pinch hit’ in all kinds of ways. This could be research administration, grant management, or coordinating information flows between multiple stakeholders and institutions.

Example 4

We are trying to see if it is possible to build up longer-term relationships with institutions that customarily work on implementation and are now trying to move towards more evidence generation. These partnerships are not currently funded, but we would need you to travel to countries where this is starting, help raise funds, figure out how to make this work, etc. This could be as simple as “here is an organogram that could work” to “I built a website that leverages their huge amount of data to show something useful….” This is working closely with our (wonderful) students, so you should also like mentoring students and working with them.

Example 5

We are working in Kenya and Nigeria on health insurance. This work is at a very early stage, but we need someone to come and work with us on data collection and analysis as the project builds out. There may be A/B experiments as well as non-experimental analysis of the health insurance scheme.

How will we know if you are the right person?

Given recent experiences, we expect many applications. You have to figure out a way to make your application stand out. We have developed four exercises to learn about your skills in a structured manner. Each of them allows for a lot of creativity, which we encourage you to take advantage of.

Note on AI

We value and encourage appropriate use of AI. We consider setting up productive AI workflows to be part of the necessary skillset for this position. REMEMBER: You should not use AI to do the work for you if you do not know what is going on–we will ask you in the next stage to explain everything, and if you won’t be able to, it is embarrassing for both you and us. If you used AI for any of the tasks, please submit the relevant AI conversation log(s) as well. AI usage includes the use of large language models (LLMs) for ideation, creation (written or analytical), or refinement of your structured work tasks. The primary purpose of the conversation log is for us to understand how you seek AI assistance and for which tasks.

Structured things we need from you:

Exercise 1
We have a workshop of stakeholders travelling from different locations to DC on the private school guidance (example 2 above). You have previously worked with us to decide the content of the workshop.

1. What will you do in the 1 week prior to the workshop

2. What is your proposed role and actions during the workshop

3. What will you do in the 1 week after the workshop

4. What support would you need from the rest of the group?

Write a short internal note responding to these four questions.

Exercise 2
We are trying to figure out how many primary health centers (PHCs) there are in Oyo State, Nigeria. You can scrape data from any source (OpenStreet Maps, Google, etc., etc.) as well as PHC location admin data. We would like to know how many PHCs are in clusters, meaning how many PHCs are near other PHCs. Submit your code and your code output(s) for this exercise. All code outputs should be ready to share and presentable to an external partner, like a funder, an implementer, or a government official.

Exercise 3

The presentations linked above under Example 1 discuss the long-term impacts of an intervention that raised test scores in primary schools in Pakistan. Produce an explainer of these results for a mainstream audience – it could be a writing piece, a cartoon, an animation, a combination of them, or a secret fifth thing. Submit the explainer.

Exercise 4

A partner reached out because they want to run a follow-up study measuring the long-term impact of the RTE (Right to Education) Act in India, which provided quotas for students in private schools in India. The partner has conducted a first study examining the take-up of the policy. For a long-term follow-up study, they performed power calculations to compute the sample size for studying the impact of private schools on years of education and wages of students 17 years after the RTE was rolled out for the students. Their unit of analysis will be RTE beneficiaries.

Write code in Stata, R, or Python doing power calculations for this study. You will need information about the RTE program from the paper shared above. You may also need a calibration dataset, which we are sharing here. Accompany your code with a short note explaining the methodology and detailing every assumption and parameter for your calculations. This note, along with the final output from your code, should be presentable to the partner. Submit the note, the code, and the code output(s) for this task.

We do not expect any of the candidates to execute each of these to perfection, and we do not “weigh” any one task more or less than the others. Instead, we will use these to try to figure out the strengths of different candidates, and where we would need to build up capabilities and complement those strengths.

Submission guidelines

You will make two submissions for this application.

1. Submit your official application via the Georgetown’s workday portal. It includes standard experience and motivation questions. Please do not include your submissions to any of the work tasks in this application.

2. Upload your exercises at this link. Please follow the instructions on the upload page. All your work for all four exercises should be combined into one .zip folder.

Note that we will not consider any applications that have NOT made both submissions. Should you have any questions about the application process, you can reach out by email to our Director of Research and Partnerships, Béatrice Leydier, at bl517@georgetown.edu.

Work Interactions

The Data and Research Associate will work under the Principal Investigators and gui2de’s Research Managers and the Director of Research. The position will also supervise several student Research Assistants.

Requirements and Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree and 3-5 years of grant and contract experience required. Analytical experience with STATA, R, Overleaf/LaTeX, Git/Github will be particularly helpful. If you have already developed your Agentic AI’s, that is great.

Preferred Qualifications

Master’s degree with significant coursework on empirical methods and data analysis.

Work Mode Designation

This position has been designated as Hybrid. Please note that work mode designations are regularly reviewed in order to meet the evolving needs of the University. Such a review may necessitate a change to a position’s mode of work designation. Complete details about Georgetown University’s mode of work designations for staff positions can be found on the Department of Human Resources website: https://hr.georgetown.edu/mode-of-work-designation.

Pay Range:

The projected salary or hourly pay range for this position which represents the full range of anticipated compensation is:

Compensation is determined by a number of factors including, but not limited to, the candidate’s individual qualifications, experience, education, skills, and certifications, as well as the University’s business needs and external factors.

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EEO Statement:

GU is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply, and will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, citizenship, color, disability, family responsibilities, gender identity and expression, genetic information, marital status, matriculation, national origin, race, religion, personal appearance, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Benefits:

Georgetown University offers a comprehensive and competitive benefit package that includes medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance, retirement savings, tuition assistance, work-life balance benefits, employee discounts and an array of voluntary insurance options. You can learn more about benefits and eligibility on the Department of Human Resources website.