Tips and Tricks About Working in PAE Pairs

Tips and Tricks about working in PAE pairs based on

Jieun Baek and Laila Matar’s Experience

We wrote this note based on our rewarding experience working as a pair for our PAE. We are both extremely type-A people whose color-coded Google calendars run our lives, and enjoyed this academically collaborative experience during our MPP years. The goal of this note is not necessarily to convince you to work with a fellow classmate, but to provide anecdotal data points from our singular experience in the event that you are indeed thinking about working as a pair. Please take our words with a grain of salt, and feel free to reach out to us. Best of luck!

Benefits of working in pairs: If partners are chosen well, there are tremendous benefits in working in pairs for the MPP PAE.

1. The pair could potentially cover a broader research question, conduct a larger number of interviews, review more extensive research materials, and deliver a more substantial product.

2. The pair could give each other constructive and honest feedback throughout the process that could help hone research, writing, and interview skills.

For example, we gave each other feedback at the end of most days during our three-week research mission in Lebanon about the other person’s interviewing skills, her ability to navigate ambiguity, her ability to balance professionalism with building camaraderie with interviewees, and ability to stay alert and sharp throughout the day. At the end of the research mission, we went out for a nice dinner to give each other comprehensive feedback that the other person could use for the future (e.g. networking skills, communication style, work ethic, first impressions, and interview “flow”).

3. A good partner will be a much harsher and more effective critic than almost any other MPP friend who agrees to edit your paper. After all, your and your partner’s incentives are aligned, whereas an MPP friend who edits your PAE draft has her own PAE to write! That said, your partner might suffer from the same blind spots as you since you work so closely, so outside eyes are also key.

4. Working in pairs is good training for co-authoring reports in the future.

Process of finding each other as PAE partners: Jieun sent a facebook message to her IGA MPP2 facebook group, asking if anyone was interested in working as a pair on some topic related to the Middle East. Within hours, she received eight responses from IGA students who were interested, so she asked all interested parties to meet that afternoon at 3PM in the courtyard to have an open discussion about what different people were interested in so that people could pair off. Everyone went around and shared topic areas of interest and very naturally, Jieun and Laila’s partnership emerged from that conversation. Their IR interests, level of commitment, organizing methods, and intensive working styles aligned well.

Norm-setting: After we agreed to work together, we spent an hour talking about our communication styles (text, call, email?), schedules, other time commitments, best/worst times to call, expected turnaround times for responses, our styles of receiving feedback (we both prefer blunt, honest feedback), etc.

Working schedule: We decided to block off every Friday from 9AM-2PM or so until the PAE was due for joint PAE work time. Of course we’d work on our parts separately throughout the week, but given our other commitments, we thought it was essential to prioritize a set work time. At the beginning of each Friday session, we would write out a detailed agenda of what we planned to accomplish during our time together, and at the end of the session, we would write out action items that we both would be accountable for by the next Friday. We took turns bringing coffee and breakfast, which resulted in the semi-official “coffee fund” where our families contributed a few hundred dollars to keep our Friday sessions productive. No joke.

Research Mission: We traveled to Beirut, Lebanon for three weeks in December, 2013 to conduct interviews for our PAE. During our research mission, we conducted over sixty interviews, made over 150 contacts in Lebanon, visited a few Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps, and refined our research questions multiple times. Below are a few things that helped us get the most of our time there.

1. Google Doc: We created a “Master Google Doc” that was our central working document for everything related to the PAE. We had about a dozen tabs to organize our contacts, interview calendar in Beirut down to the hour, research articles, our personal deadlines (in addition to the MPP office’s draft deadlines), hyperlinks to our other PAE drafts that we typed up on Google docs, and names of people we met along the way who we wanted to acknowledge in our PAE. (Send us a note if you want to see this; it may or may not be useful for you.)

2. Planning: We met with a ton of professors, graduate students, visiting fellows, and students throughout Harvard University and at other Boston universities who put us in touch with contacts in Beirut who could be useful. We got in touch with these Beirut-based contacts to set up appointments so that we could start our interviews right when we landed.

3. Interviews: We set up a system where one of us would “own” the interview. Owning an interview meant doing background research of the interviewee and his/her organization, driving the conversation, giving the opening spiel about who we are and what the goal of our PAE was, and ending the interview at an appropriate time. Then, the owner of the interview would be in charge of typing up notes from the interview, ideally before the end of that day. After we compiled all our interviews, we developed our own coding system to organize the 100+ pages of typed interview notes we had.

Drafts: We created our own schedule to write our drafts and built in plenty of editing time before the MPP deadline. Since we did all of our writing on Google docs, we were able to constantly access each other’s writing, and leave notes, comments, questions, and suggestions for the other person. We assigned the various sections to each person, and then edited the other person’s writing multiple times over.

Medical Emergency: Jieun was hospitalized multiple times between January and February, and by end of February, her surgical team decided she had to undergo another operation. She missed four weeks of school, and we received a four-week extension for our PAE. We realized that no matter how much we obsessively planned and tried to preemptively address foreseeable issues, we could not plan for everything. During Jieun’s hospitalization, Laila typed away at the PAE while visiting Jieun regularly. Though frustrating, we had to adapt to this medical emergency and work through it.

Home stretch: After spring break, when most other MPPs were finished with their PAEs and reveled in their freedom, we continued to work on our PAE well into April. We exported our Google doc draft into a Microsoft word document and took turns editing the whole draft before submitting our final product to our PAE seminar leader Professor Matthew Bunn, PAE advisor Graham Allison, and the MPP office.

This memo is based purely on MPP alumnas Jieun Baek and Lailla Matar’s (Class 2014) experiences. Please feel free to reach out to them at and .