Betsy Knowles, Economics, one of six UWL faculty members selected for the 2016 Eagle Teaching Excellence Award.

Eagle Teaching Excellence Award winners announced.

SAVE THE DATE

Sports Economics Symposium

Monday, April 11, 2016

UWL Graff Main Hall Auditorium

Featuring: Oliver Luck, NCAA Executive Vice President Regulatory Affairs

More details

Nothing Else To Do?

Below we have a chart that visualizes the rate of binge drinking by state, which I'm grabbing from this blog. The Midwest to some degree, and the colder, northern regions to a larger degree appear to have the highest rates. What are some theories that can explain this relationship?

Go-getters

Some interesting advice for our juniors and seniors in the job hunt.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123845358462571299.html

Economics club next meeting

The next meeting of the Econ club will be Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at 5:30pm in 114 Wimberly Hall.
We will be discussing the public-private investment partnership and the Wall Street Journal's forum on the future of finance. You can find the articles and videos from this forum on the Wall Street Journal website. They came up with 20 principles that should be the basis for finance in the future. You can find them here.

Econ Club By-Laws

Josh Lieder and Andy Cowan have started work on a proposal for the Econ Club By-laws.
If you are interested in working on the bylaws, a small group is meeting at the cybercafe on Thursday, March 26 at 5:30pm.

You can find the proposed bylaws here.
http://www.uwlax.edu/faculty/birkeland/Econ-Club.htm

Economics Student Discussion

The first meeting of the Economics student discussion group was a hit! We are meeting again on Wednesday, October 29th at 4pm in 307 CWH. Please join us if you can.

Economics Student Discussion

The current economic situation in the US has prompted many discussions of macroeconomic policy, monetary policy, and the workings of the US economy. Multiple students have expressed interest in getting together to discuss current economic events. This discussion would be student led.

I propose an initial meeting time of 4:30pm on Wednesday, October 22 in room 257 in the Cartwright Center. If you are interested, join the Facebook group ‘UW-L Economics Students’ or email me.

If you have a specific question or an article to discuss, bring it with you.

Kathryn Birkeland
birkelan.kath@uwlax.edu

Google Advice to Students

Google gives great advice to students and  sounds like they are describing BUS 230.

Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning
7/15/2008 05:48:00 PM
Management guru Peter Drucker noted that companies attracting the best knowledge workers will "secure the single biggest factor for competitive advantage." We and other forward-looking companies put a lot of effort into hiring such people. What are we looking for?

At the highest level, we are looking for non-routine problem-solving skills. We expect applicants to be able to solve routine problems as a matter of course. After all, that's what most education is concerned with. But the non-routine problems offer the opportunity to create competitive advantage, and solving those problems requires creative thought and tenacity.

Here's a real-life example, a challenge a team of our engineers once faced: designing a spell-checker for the Google search engine. The routine solution would be to run queries through a dictionary. The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries. This approach enables us to correct all the words that aren't in the dictionary, helping many more users in the process.

How do we find these non-routine savants? There are many factors, of course, but we primarily look for ...

... analytical reasoning. Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk about what we know, instead of what we think we know.

... communication skills. Marshalling and understanding the available evidence isn't useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions.

... a willingness to experiment. Non-routine problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no formula for success. A well-designed experiment calls for a range of treatments, explicit control groups, and careful post-treatment analysis. Sometimes an experiment kills off a pet theory, so you need a willingness to accept the evidence even if you don't like it.

... team players. Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need to work well together and perform up to the team's expectations.

... passion and leadership. This could be professional or in other life experiences: learning languages or saving forests, for example. The main thing, to paraphrase Mr. Drucker, is to be motivated by a sense of importance about what you do.

These characteristics are not just important in our business, but in every business, as well as in government, philanthropy, and academia. The challenge for the up-and-coming generation is how to acquire them. It's easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.

And then keep on challenging yourself, because learning doesn't end with graduation. In fact, in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Economics major John Lauermann for receiving the prestigious 2008 Murphy Award for being the top graduating senior in May 2008. More details on John's achievement can be found here.