You truly bridge social sciences and data science and bring them down to the ground where the truth is.

I'm looking forward to following your next intellectual and policy adventure and, most of all, your upcoming book!

His approach embodies rigor and reflexive thinking across social science disciplines (economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science) as well as data science (NLP, ML, and AI), all grounded in deep compassion and a genuine interest in people, their ideas, and collective agency.

I shared the video with a colleague in civic tech, and his first reaction was that the Bank was many years ahead of us. There are definitely common threads between what Biju has been doing at the Bank and what many of us in the civic tech space in the U.S. government are striving for.

9. Consider civic tech and government service (this time, state and local) as meaningful, high-impact career paths.

Link for the full Substack post is here: jaeyeonkim.substack.com/p/9-tips-for...

6. Use your campus as a platform to meet practitioners (create an event and invite them).
7. Talk to alumni who thrive outside academia.
8. Go to APPAM if you are a policy-oriented social scientist.

1. Every job market is tough.
2. Don’t treat nonacademic roles as a fallback.
3. Don’t burn bridges with advisors or colleagues.
4. Don’t choose a nonacademic path only because you dislike parts of academia.
5. Use your summer strategically and seek internships when possible.

The flip side is this: you don’t need to succeed every time. What you need is to keep raising the chance that you’ll be ready to seize the right opportunity when it comes your way.

It didn’t matter if nine out of ten didn’t like it. That realization lifted a weight off his shoulders.

When he ran a small jazz bar, where he wrote his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) at the kitchen table, he realized that if one out of ten customers liked the place enough to return, that was enough.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami writes about this in his running memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007). We can’t please everyone and we can’t succeed every time.

The goal isn’t to win everything you go after, but to learn from the process, see where you can grow, and do a better job the next time.

I wrote about that reflection here: jaeyk.github.io/essays/memor...

The reason I’ve always wanted to sit at the intersection of research and practice is also deeply personal. I came from a working-class family, and I never forgot that root. I’ve wanted to produce research that matters beyond the ivory tower.

But I can be candid about what worked for me, what didn’t, and what I would have done differently if I had a second chance. That's what I shared.

I often find that fact is stranger than fiction and that life is full of surprising turns. For this reason, I don't think I'm in a position to offer definitive advice on how to build a meaningful, productive, and policy-relevant research career.

More broadly, the project examines how low-income racial minority communities, often presumed powerless, responded to and overcame institutional barriers during this era.