 I see a couple of students are here. We'll give it a few more minutes. This is the economics, welcome to economics Zoom session. It is being recorded. We'll record the main presentation and then we'll stop recording when we have questions. But we'll wait a few more minutes for people to join in. All right, we've given this a couple of minutes. I think it's time to start. This is the economics department information session. We have a bunch of people who are here to share information with you about the economics department and also to answer your questions. We'll do a little short presentation. You can text, chat your questions during the presentation. We may stop and answer some of them during the presentation or we'll get to the chat at the end. We'll record the session during the main presentation. When we get to the end, we will stop the recording and then you can ask further questions. We can answer further questions. They came up in the chat. Just have a conversation about whatever we wanna have a conversation about. So welcome to economics. So I'll introduce myself. I'm Valerie Voorhees. I'm a lecturer in the economics department. I teach lots of the courses, but I'm also the director of undergraduate advising and I'm gonna help things move along today. So let me share my screen and get us started. So first I wanna introduce Michael Osh. He's the director, I mean undergraduate program director and a professor of economics in the economics department. I'm gonna introduce him and he is gonna tell you a little bit about economics and what economics is at UMass. Hi and welcome. I am Michael Lash. I'm the professor of economics and public policy here at UMass. I came to UMass last millennium in 1999 and it's a pleasure for me to welcome you. I'll tell you a little bit more about the department and how an exciting place it is a little bit later in this presentation. For now I wanna talk a little bit about majoring in economics, which I highly recommend. I think it's one of the best moves a college undergraduate can do. It goes great with anything. It goes great with engineering. You can go great with humanities. It can be just economics for and of itself. Important thing to understand about economics and maybe something that you're rather that many of our incoming students are concerned about is this relationship to business. So economics is not in the Eisenberg School of Management. Economics is a social science. That means that we're interested in generalizable principles about how and why people do the things they do. People as economic actors. Even though it's not business, it is extremely valuable for business people to understand economics. So while economics is a social science and complements many interesting areas of study, it can also be a really good route into the study of business if that is where your interests take you. We have a lot of emphasis on building skills in economics. This particular economics department has a lot of focus on history and on writing as well as on mathematical methods for modeling and understanding, maybe even predicting the economy. So that's a real plus. We put a lot of focus on communication, on quantitative, both doing quantitative analysis and then communicating it clearly and with graphics. So it's a pleasure to welcome you. I'll tell you a little bit more about what an exciting department this is in just a couple of moments. And I'm going to pass off to my colleague, undergraduate advisor, Stephanie Brewer. Hi everybody, welcome to our presentation. So I'm one of the academic advisors at UMass in economics and our goal is to mostly help you get to graduation but also talk to you about all of the opportunities that are available at UMass. So on this slide here, we're looking at the major requirements. So in economics, one of the best things about the major is how flexible it is. We only require eight core classes that cover our economic theory and mathematics, three international and intercultural electives and four upper level economics electives. So those upper level economics electives are where you get to kind of explore your interests while everybody has to take the theory classes. If you're interested in things like economics of health or development economics or the economics of the environment or law and economics or many, many other topics that are wonderful professors but research in these upper level electives are where you would get to take those classes and while we only require four upper levels you get to take really as many as you'd like. We also have this option A versus option B. Now the philosophy of the economics department is that we want you to be broadly educated. So the idea of option A is you just take two additional upper level economics classes but for option B, which about 60% of our students choose you add on either a secondary major, a minor or certificate or if you're like a lot of our students you add on multiple credentials with multiple majors, multiple minors. The flexibility of the major is really what attracts a lot of our students. It is relatively easy to add an economics major with all of its marketability to just about any other major on campus. And one of the goals of the advising team is to help you make those options work for you. So the other things that we want that I want to introduce to you about the sides just exactly kind of the classes that you'll take is all the opportunities that we have for students at UMass. You know, when you're coming to college it's not just about the classes but it's about the experiences that you accumulate which are both kind of personal experience as well as experiences that you can take forward into your professional careers and into the job market. So I highly recommend if you do choose to come to UMass that you consider one of our residential academic programs for your first year on campus. These are small classes that allow you to get to know a small group of students on the very, very large UMass campus. So the goal of the RAP program as we call them is to help you meet a core group of first year students just like you. And so you're taking a class with a small group of students that you live in the same dorm with and you take that class with. So I highly recommend them if you do opt into coming to UMass. Some of the other opportunities that are available are taking classes through our five college consortium which includes Amherst College, Smith, Mount Holyoke and Hampshire College. So UMass students can take classes on other campuses with the flexibility of the economics major. It is relatively easy to incorporate a study abroad experience for either a semester or even a full year. Many people are familiar with study abroad which is obviously going outside of the country but you can also participate in what we call domestic exchange which is where you go to another university within the United States. I can tell you that Hawaii is a very popular choice with our students especially for the spring semester which tends to be mostly winter. You'll also have the opportunity to participate in an internship. So again, the flexibility of the economics major means that taking a semester to be able to do nothing but an internship is entirely feasible and still graduate on time. So some of these programs are SBS and Boston. So again, SBS stands for the college which is social and behavioral sciences. So SBS and Boston is a full semester internship program in Boston. SBS in DC is summer internships in DC and we also have a winter job shadowing program. That's usually a day or two where you meet with an alumni and spend the day with them to get an idea of what their job is like. So we really are not just about the experiences that you have on campus but also off campus and how you can build those into your long-term career and experiences. So the last slide was talking about kind of opportunities available to all SBS students and UMass students. We also have opportunities available specifically to the economics majors. Often I'm asked about research opportunities and through the department you can participate in what's called the Euro program or the economics undergraduate research assistantships where you work specifically with a faculty member on some of their research. We also have an undergraduate economics club which as you see in the picture here during one of their networking trips. So they meet a lot with our alumni and work on kind of those job skills height and that networking piece that is so important when thinking about your long-term careers. The UMass economics department also runs the Massachusetts undergraduate journal of economics where undergraduates can have their research published. At UMass we also have many opportunities for support. So whether that is career support, academic support through the learning resource center or the student success programs which offers workshops throughout the year on things like study skills and time management. Our residence life programs when, which hopefully you guys will be on campus with us in the fall, we've already bringing some students back to campus for the spring semester and having some on-campus classes and in-person classes. So we're really excited about those going forward this spring. And we also have robust programs and workshops through our center for counseling and psychological health. So we really do focus on kind of the holistic student and offer both those career pieces, the personal wellness experiences as well as academic support. And so our economics department advising team consists of me, Flannery, who's also here and will help answer questions a little bit later. Jennifer Gross, she's also participating and you've already met Valerie and Russell Janis who's not with us today but is our internship coordinator. So our job is to again, mainly help you get to graduation but really to help you access all of the other opportunities that are here on campus. Generally speaking, we are your first stop for any questions that you might have. So if you don't know who to go to, we might not be the right person but we absolutely know who that right person is and we can connect you to the best person to answer the questions that you have. And now I will hand it off to one of our department peer advisors, Layla. Thank you. So hi everyone, my name is Layla. I'm a junior econ major and econ peer advisor and essentially I started the peer advising role back in May. I started as a summer peer advisor and then we like brought it into a full school year program which has been really cool. And essentially as a peer advisor, our goal is to kind of act as a resource for students on the matters of picking classes, giving recommendations while also kind of providing that student perspective that a lot of times like the advisors know from speaking to a lot of students but they can't really like relate to it because they aren't obviously current students. So that's kind of what we do for the most part. We also like to tell students a lot about the kind of the activities going on on campus and ways that you can find to kind of connect to campus life. Obviously it's a little hard given the pandemic just because everything's virtual but the economic department as well as UMass itself has been like trying to do a lot of virtual programs and things to kind of get people to connect. So we also promote those as well. And this semester we got three new peer advisors Ariane, Alan and Alvin who are all also on the call. And I'm trying to think of what else we do. We have at least three drop-in sessions a week. We made sure to really make sure that the times are all very different so they accommodate everyone on the globe. And basically we try to make your life a little easier. I feel like school is very stressful and all of us wanna act as a really valuable resource. So yeah, I think that's basically the general gist of what we do. And hopefully by the fall, you'll all be in-person as well as Kanjo. Be lovely. Yeah, so I said earlier I'd tell you what a great department this is and it really is. You know, you're coming to UMass Amherst which has the excitement of a very big university. But we also, because we live in a small town, you'll run into your professors walking around town. We have kind of two speeds of classes. One speed of class is large lectures. You will do some of that in your early years but we move you as quickly as we can to upper level classes where you and 24 of your peers will sit down with the professor around a table or around the room and have a conversation about interesting ideas. So it's a very exciting place to work. We have an outstanding advising staff. You've met some of them here this evening. You'll meet others when you arrive. And the advising staff works very closely with you to make sure that the university stays responsive to your needs. We offer lots of opportunities for independent activity. We have a need economics undergraduate research assistantship where you can do actual research with a faculty member on the subjects that they are experted, that they are often globally renowned experts in. We also have a new program in public policy. We can connect you with that. We have a world famous faculty. Here are just a handful of my colleagues, people. You will see on news shows, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, world's leading newspapers. So if you take a look around here, I won't read a PowerPoint slide out loud too. You'll have plenty of that available to you after you arrive. But you can see that these are cutting edge. We have people who are working on the minimum wage. Lee Badgett is the world's foremost economist of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual life. LGBT life. And that is something that is unique and special at UMass. We have people who work on global financial missed crime. Leonos Nidukumana has personally uncovered and at great personal risk uncovered irregularities, shall we say, in international finance. And it's someone who has published on that and exposed trade and illegal financial assets. Bob Pollan, my colleague recently published a book with Noam Chomsky, maybe you've heard of him, on the Green New Deal. Jayati Ghosh has just joined the department. She is one of the leading economists in India, the world's largest democracy at 1.2 billion people. And she is also one of the world's leading feminist economists. We're a center for feminist economics as well. So if you want to sit down with and hang out with professors who you'll then see on the evening news, UMass is a good place for you. Let me just give you another example of a way that we're world-class. We attract interesting people who would like to come and speak with us. We have an annual lecture, the gamble lecture. You as students get essentially front row seats at that lecture, which is a real treat. And we have luminaries. We've had, I was counting before speaking, I think we've had about, I think we might have had as many as 10. Oop, we go back as many as 10 Nobel Prize winners have come to speak recently, Amartya San and Paul Krugman. Janet Yellen, who is now the secretary of the treasury. I think we'll get a little bit more about her to the tune of Hamilton in just a moment. But when she was chair of the Fed before, she'd really hit the big time. She came and spoke to us. Yanis Faroufakis is only one of the speakers who has been the object of a major motion picture. He'll be here later this year. Earlier we had a John Nash, you might remember from a beautiful mind. This is a very exciting place to come study and learn with people who are making news and analyzing the world around us. So I think that brings to the end our formal presentation. We are here for you. We'd love to take questions. I put my email address in the chat box. It's mash at umass.edu. You did remember is, you know, mash is just easy to remember. So if you have follow-up questions, I hope you won't hesitate to write to me. And I think the floor is open, Del. Is that for-