The Timing of First Professional Experience and Engineering Careers: Evidence from Random Assignment

We thank seminar and conference participants at the Duke Field Experiments Conference, ESMT, Arizona State University, the Economics of Science and Engineering Workshop at Harvard University, the Roundtable for Engineering Entrepreneurship Research (REER) Conference, the University of Maryland, and Boston University for helpful comments. We are grateful to the program’s administrators and staff for their advice and support, and to the university’s Senior Vice Provost for access to the administrative records, granted under a special data agreement and a written data-protection procedure. These records are confidential and cannot be shared by the authors; the university is not named, and no reported result identifies an individual student. Employment histories are licensed from Revelio Labs, and the replication package contains all code and instructions for requesting access to each data source. We did not seek review by an Institutional Review Board: the study analyzes historical, de-identified administrative records of an assignment that the university itself randomized as part of routine program administration, before our study began, and we learned of the randomization through interviews with program administrators. We thank Mingyue (Luna) Wu, Muyang Zhou, and Bochau Sun for excellent research assistance, and we acknowledge financial support from Boston University, Cornell University, and, at Northeastern University, the D’Amore-McKim School of Business and the Research Institute for Experiential Learning Science. Boudreau thanks the faculty, staff, and co-operative education advisors of the University of Waterloo, where he studied undergraduate engineering as a co-op student. Each author’s disclosure statement is provided separately. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• June 28, 2019