E34 - Working at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with Will Wheeler

The Hidden Curriculum

In this episode we talk with Will Wheeler about working at the Environmental Protection Agency. Will is an environmental economist at the U.S. EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics. He mostly conducts research regarding water quality and enforcement issues and is interested in the quality of EPA’s environmental data and helping people understand the EPA's data sets. He is also interested in the potential for gaming of environmental data. He is Past-President of the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association and is on the Editorial Board of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. In this episode we talk about What does the EPA do? What is the role of economist on the EPA? What are day-to-day tasks? What are some misconceptions about the work in a government agencies? and other interesting questions!

Sebastian Tello-Trillo is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy in the University of Virginia.

Alex Hollingsworth is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Indiana University.

Recommendations of the week:

- Will recommends checking the book "No drama discipline" and if you are an environmental economist and are looking for research topics, look into the trade press like "Inside EPA"

- Alex recommends having a plain text file to "accumulate" things to do, and only concentrate on a number of things per day/week.

- Sebastian recommends the book "Make Time" by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. Find it here