Feeling Chuffed Again

I'm looking forward to doing my first lecture at Victoria University today, so I hope it is not disloyal to write a post celebrating the success of students from the University of Canterbury.

Last year, I wrote celebrating post-graduate successes of students from my Honours class of 2009, and lauding the diversity of the Canterbury programme that emphasised both analytical rigour and traditional liberal arts learning. This year, the cause for celebration is the recent graduate recruitment round by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Three students who were in my intermediate-micro-with-calculus sequence in 2013, Amy Rice, Michael Callaghan, and Simon Greenwood, were successful in securing positions at the RBNZ for 2016 in the early-bird recruitment round for the RBNZ. My understanding is that they were the only three students in New Zealand to receive such offers. Two of them, Amy and Michael, also received Reserve Bank scholarships for their Honours year in 2015.

These successes continues the astonishing record Canterbury has had in placing students into the RBNZ over the past decade. Sadly, this might be one of the last cohorts from Canterbury to enjoy this success. As a result of the financial difficulties following the earthquake, management there has decided that the Department needs to focus on its broad-based B.Com. Accordingly, it no longer offers micro with calculus at the second year, has cancelled its Arts-style current-economic issues course, and has introduced a new Bachelor of Business Economics major targeted at a different group of students. In the current financial environment with a much smaller department, it was probably necessary for Canterbury to narrow its focus, but I hope they are able to return to offering its top students a strong maths-based, liberal-arts-consistent programme. The country needs rigorously trained economists with multi-disciplinary grounding. Fortunately, Otago, Vic and Auckland still offer calculus-based micro at the second year.

Feeling Chuffed

It was a great day for the ECON department at Canterbury on Wednesday. Our very own Rachel Webb, successfully defended her doctoral thesis, The Health Economics of Macrosomia. Rachel has been a part of the Department for many years, having previously completed her Bachelor's and Honours' degrees at Canterbury prior to starting her Ph.D. Eric blogged on a preliminary finding from Rachel's thesis here last year.

Rachel's successful defence comes on the heels of some other notable achievements of our recent students: James Graham has just started his doctoral studies at New York University, as one of the 26 New Zealand recipients of a Fulbright Award, and the only one with a degree in Economics; Nick Sander has just started his doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley; James Horrocks has recently completed his MBA at Cambridge; and Reza Baqaee is just finishing up his Ph.D. at Harvard.

These are not our only success stories by any means, but the notable thing for me about these five is that they were all in my Honours welfare economics class in 2009. The thing I have enjoyed most about teaching in our Honours programme over the past 14 years has not only been the incredible quality of our students, but also the diversity of their academic backgrounds, in large part because we have made a feature of the fact that one can major in Economics as part of an Arts, Science, or Commerce degree. James Graham and James Horrocks both did double majors in Economics and Philosophy; Nick and Reza completed combined Honours degrees in Economics and Maths, and the same class included students with undergraduate degrees in History, Physics and Finance. Keynes is famous for his statement that a master economist "must be mathematician, historian, statesman philosopher". It is too much to ask that students coming into graduate Economics have studied every one of these other subjects in detail, but the next best thing is to have a class that collectively has that breadth.