Dear Alberto, Amy, Caroline, Christine, Christy, Claudia, David C.,
David R., David W., Don, Duncan, Janet, Jeff, Jon, Josh, Malcolm, Mark,
Michael, Monika, Nancy, Nick, Pete, Raj, and Rob -
It was great to see each of you, and to hear about the current
activities in your programs, at the Summer Institute. I hope that
you've had a great summer since then.
I am writing for two reasons. The first is to invite you to join me for
dinner on the Thursday evening before the start of the ASSA meetings in
Philadelphia next January. We have booked the William Penn Room at R2L,
a restaurant on the 37th Floor at 50 South 16th Street in Philadelphia,
for 7pm on Thursday, January 2, 2014. The restaurant is near the
convention hotels. The dinner is just a small token of my appreciation
for all that you do to advance the NBER's mission. In past years, this
"program directors dinner" has also provided a great opportunity to
discuss a range of issues that cut across NBER programs. I hope that
you will be able to attend! I wanted to let you know about this dinner
so that you could factor it into your travel planning for Philadelphia.
Please let me know if you will be able to join the group for this
gathering.
Second, I would like to ask for your help in designing a short survey
that we can use to collect participant evaluations of the NBER Summer
Institute. While the Summer Institute seems to be incredibly popular, I
receive very little feedback on the substance of the meetings. (I do
receive quite a number of messages like "more fruit at breakfast!" and
"fajitas again?") I've tried to craft a short survey that we can
distribute to the participants from this year's meeting in the hope that
we can learn something more about participant reactions. I don't have
much experience with survey design, so this is very much an amateur
effort. I've attached my draft to this message. If you have any
suggestions for questions that we should include, or if you see pitfalls
in some of the questions that are currently listed, please let me know.
I am hoping to send this out by mid-September.
Thank you for devoting your time and energy to advancing the NBER's
research mission. All best wishes.
Jim
Received on Sun Sep 01 2013 - 11:32:55 EDT
