By: Tait Militana ’19
During the summer 2018, Tait Militana joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a student trainee in economics. He worked at the Economic Research Service, USDA’s arm for agriculture and economics research, where he supported a data product that forecasts income across the U.S. farm sector. The product is released three times a year, providing a measure of the health of the farm sector as well as its contribution to GDP
Tait’s principal project was to build out a database of historic farm income forecasts and provide initial analysis to help ERS answer the question: How accurate are our projections?
He also provided support for ERS’ August income release.
During his internship, Tait worked extensively with the SAS and Stata statistical programs and learned data manipulation and extraction techniques.
“Having the opportunity to program every day in a research environment helped me deepen my skill set in quantitative analysis and compliment the economics training I’ve received at IPED,” Tait said.
In addition to the programming experience, the ERS internship exposed Tait to the many policy issue affecting American farmers as well as the federal system for producing, analyzing, and dissemination economic statistics.
