Surrounded by questions
Most PhD projects require great commitment, and Nils Wernerfelt's is no exception. Last year, when he suddenly received the opportunity to collaborate with researchers at Facebook, he flew out on a week's notice to San Francisco and has been living out of his suitcase, sleeping on friends’ floors or in Airbnb’s and sublets ever since. Embedding within a large tech company, working face-to-face with computer scientists, sociologists, and statisticians from around the world has been “really exciting,” Wernerfelt says. This diversity of backgrounds is particularly appealing to him, as throughout his time at MIT, he has worked on projects ranging from the connection between asthma and vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy, to changing attitudes about the LGBT community. For Wernerfelt, a PhD candidate in economics, there is no shortage of research topics in the world; the difficulty is in deciding which one to pursue next. Finding questions everywhere After finishing his bachelor’s degree...