MSUM students are doing amazing things. Our students embrace diversity, challenges, opportunities, unique experiences and continue to produce incredible results. Our students participate in student organizations, attend and present at regional and national conferences, compete at regional and national competitions, collaborate on faculty-mentored projects, gain hands-on experience through internships, help coordinate community service projects, and more. Many have won prestigious scholarships for academic excellence and many have won awards for their stellar work inside and outside of the classroom. See what the students from the Economics Department are doing.
Diamond Stokes, Economics
“I really liked learning how Economics relates to pretty much everything in our life.” “I wanted a small school so that I could get to know my professors a little more, be more involved in the college. I really love the faculty. I got to work with Professor T.J. Hansen in teaching Economics to junior high school girls. That was a fun experience.”
Kegan Reiswig, Economics
"The thing about MSUM that's so great is the atmosphere the professors create for the students and how personable they are. They’ll walk through the classroom during the lectures and say ‘Kegan what do you think about this?’ They challenge you to think about the problems, and it’s not a lecture hall like bigger universities.The classes are small.The professors are really warm and inviting. It’s just been great the past three years I’ve been at MSUM." "Every year the program sends people to New York City for an Economics conference. I had the opportunity to go last semester. Another person in our major and I wrote papers and presented them in downtown Manhattan. Also, there is another conference in St. Cloud where there are opportunities for MSUM students to go and hear professors from the University of Chicago and people from the Federal Reserve Banks. It’s a small program, yet there are all these huge opportunities and big names you can listen to and gather ideas from."
Amber Wolbeck, Economics
"I was awarded the Honors Apprentice Scholarship, so I am doing research on sustainable farming for that. I'm one year of research in and I would like to have something to submit to a journal. Professor T.J. Hansen is my supervisor. I meet with her and show her what I've been working on and she gives me pointers and shows me the right direction.""You definitely learn a lot from doing research: how to conduct the research, how to write papers, and how to fit it into your schedule. In the spring, I went to a seminar on cover cropping to get real farmers' perspectives on what they have done and how it works, and it was really good because I basically heard that what I am doing and proposing is practical."
Nick Pates, Economics
“The Economics faculty is very diverse. They have all sorts of different fields of expertise and philosophies. There are Democrats and Republicans, which is very refreshing.” “If you go here, you can do big things and go places. You can see what Economics alums are doing now and some of that is pretty impressive, like working for the Federal Reserve, working in Washington, D.C., and being a university professor themselves.”
Kegan Reiswig and Luke Sperling, Economics majors, presented papers at the undergraduate sessions of the Eastern Economics Association meetings in New York City. Kegan found no evidence that revenue sharing in Major League Baseball has increased league competitiveness; Luke found no evidence that job opportunities near a university negatively affects the university’s freshman retention rate. Oscar Flores, Economics, mentored both students.
Six Economics majors were invited to be referees for Issues in Political Economy, a peer reviewed undergraduate journal. This experience will allow Rachel Metzger, Amber Wolbeck, Joseph Bottrell, Fariha Rahman, Keegan Reisweig, and Tanner McCarty the opportunity to hone their own research skills and to be exposed to work from students of the best colleges and universities in the country. These students are working under the direction of Oscar Flores, Economics.
