Why did you choose Professor João Santos Silva for the next Career Building International Chats (CABICH) Ones-to-one session?

Professor Santos Silva is a major figure in his areas of research. I worked on some of his articles and used his packages in Stata for my Master’s thesis. My choosing him is mainly due to the fact that he has done intensive quantitative econometrics analysis, which is the root of many courses at ASE. Moreover, his advice as a professor will be an exceptional help for ASE students academically as well as in professional career building.

How can ASE students benefit from participating in this session?

Participating in this session is a privilege for each ASE student. Firstly, because we are going to learn more through each other’s questions. Secondly, participating in this session could lead to a great opportunity for a PhD or research projects for students Professor Santos Silva might notice through interesting questions during the session.

We noticed that you often invite important persons to CABICH chats. What do you do to convince those people?

I think inviting someone to CABICH is all about convincing them through the first email. It’s true that at the beginning it was difficult, because it was something I’d never done or heard about before. It just came to my mind, I started working on it and it worked out. At the very beginning, many people turned down my invitations. But through perseverance, I know more about convincing people than before.  Can you imagine that Dr. Santos Silva was not a WhatsApp user before, but he has asked his department to provide him with a smartphone just for participating in the session with ASE students?  Also, ASE is doing more to make it easy to convince people. I applaud all the faculty, especially Professor Leonard Wantchekon. He is doing wonderful work to build ASE’s reputation. All my gratitude to him, and to students who have helped at certain times to put me in touch with some of their contacts to invite them onto the CABICH series.

Your final word?

My final word is that everybody should chip in during the chat with good questions. Students can ask questions about various economic works, but especially Dr. Santos Silva’s “The Log of Gravity”.  I encourage our students to carefully read at least the abstract and the introduction of the paper to get ready. I also encourage all the faculty to warmly welcome Santos that day to thank him for accepting the invitation to interact with ASE students.