Philosophy

My teaching philosophy has largely been shaped by Eric Sims, chair of the Economics department at the University of Notre Dame. His approach, and the one that I try to embody, is to support students, to challenge them, and then to continue to support them in that order.

I have found this approach particularly effective when it comes to Economics because while many aspects of the subject are intuitive, there are components that really stretch students. Most students making the jump from Principles of Microeconomics to Intermediate Microeconomics find it difficult to solve for the equilibrium of a model or to use implicit differentiation to find the slope of an indifference curve.

Of course, never has it been easier for a student making this jump to produce correct results without understanding the underlying material. And indeed, the emergence of technology such as chatGPT forces us to reflect on what is it that we actually want to teach – what is it that we want students to experience during the course and be able to reflect on and use after the course.

My own thinking is that more and more undergraduate work will be project based where the aim is to leverage current and developing technologies in new and exciting ways. Lectures will become more conceptual in nature with less emphasis placed on pen and paper manipulations of equations. And class conversations will become more real world oriented, diving into details of markets that we can capture by writing our models in python code with chatGPT’s assistance.

Ultimately, however the education of Economics develops, students will always be presented with challenging tasks that push them out of their comfort zone. My experience has been that in order for students to invest the time and energy required to extend themselves, they need to know that you have their best interest in mind. That while you’re asking them to do their best, you’re also doing everything you can to help them be successful.

Like most graduate students, I’ve certainly made my fair share of mistakes as a teacher both in terms of the material I chose to present and the way that I presented it. I’ve been fortunate to have been given the opportunity though to teach two semesters at Boston University and this fall at Harvard University. As with anything, though, with experience and reflection you become better. Currently, I would be comfortable teaching a range of courses from Principles of Microeconomics to the Applications of Machine Learning in Economics.