PRIMO Alumni Profile Details

“PRIMO was good practice for me in becoming a Ph.D. student”

About

Shira Li, originally from New Jersey, graduated from Harvard College in 2019, with an A.B. in Math and Computer Science and a secondary in Statistics.

She worked with Professor Scott Duke Kominers in the Entrepreneurial Unit during PRIMO Summer 2017.

Shira started her PhD program in Fall 2022 in the Business Economics track at HBS. Her research interests include finance, industrial organization, and market design.

What kind of research did you and your professor work on?

We studied two-sided matching in educational settings. For example, we sought to understand if students applying to high schools in an urban area report ranked preferences truthfully if the number of schools they can list is constrained.

PRIMO helped illuminate the type of things that my faculty advisor was interested in and the fact that he had the freedom to ask all these research questions. He could be as theoretical as he wanted, or he could go talk to Boston Public Schools and advise them on how they admitted students to high schools.

What’s something you learned from PRIMO that has helped you now as a PhD student?

At the time during PRIMO, I had a hard time figuring out when I should be struggling and when I should be asking for help from my advisor, Scott, or, how to structure my thoughts and my research to make progress on the question. It was good to have experienced that struggle once at an early age. It became easier to handle or have a better sense of when I should be reaching out for help and when I could just push on a problem for a few more hours and it would fix itself. PRIMO was good practice for me in becoming a PhD student.

PRIMO also made me aware of the diversity of backgrounds of professors. People have economics PhDs here who do economics research; but also, there are people who are in the accounting or strategy units where they come from a psychology or sociology background. I observed the windier paths that some have taken—whether they worked or chose to do an MBA before pursuing a PhD, and ultimately becoming a professor. It made me more comfortable exploring work in the private sector post-college, and that I could still come back and do research afterwards.

What were learning experiences like outside of the classroom?

We were all living together in one of the undergraduate houses, Leverett House. We had roommates who were not all PRIMO Fellows, so we interacted with the larger Research Village community. Talking about our research projects with each other was also a good way for us to get exposure to other people's research. It was good to have student groups with similar backgrounds and interests, in trying to broadly think about what we do in the future. It was helpful to talk to someone else going through the same thing as you are.

Any advice for incoming PRIMO students?

You’re here to work full-time to learn and help the professor with research, but also, it's such a good opportunity to get exposed to so much at HBS. If you're interested in any professor's work, you can reach out to them and ask to talk to them for 15 or 20 minutes about their research or path to becoming a professor. The opportunity to be at HBS and have a meeting with someone whom you might not otherwise is something that's worth taking advantage of when you're here.

It’s important to try to be open to all of the experiences and not come in with a set purpose and just trying to execute on that. Do the research that you're doing and work your hardest on that, but explore everything else there is out there.