Undergraduate Student News

Competing for the Stadelmann Scholarship was also a chance to express how much studying the social sciences has meant to me. I entered college with unformed direction. I exited college understanding that I loved generating new knowledge with the tools social science offers. Today, I apply that passion as part of the Yenching Scholarship, a funded interdisciplinary master's program at Peking University in Beijing. As part of the program, I will write a master's thesis on Chinese rural-urban inequality, the same topic I studied for my undergraduate thesis. Simultaneously, I am serving as an Economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington DC., producing the data that feeds into the Consumer Price Index.

The framework that economics has given me to understand the world and our institutions, predict decision-making, and assess policy will be invaluable in my career. I am endlessly grateful to the Department of Economics for broadening my understanding of what I could and wanted to do.