Lauren Munyard receives 2022 Outstanding Advising Award

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Lauren Munyard, Academic Advisor in the Department of Economics, has received an Outstanding Undergraduate Professional Staff Advisor Award.

“The goal of these awards is to recognize the extraordinary contributions of undergraduate academic advisors in supporting academic success and student development at the University of Connecticut.

Nominees have been evaluated on the basis of qualities and practices that distinguish them as an outstanding academic advisor. Award winners will have demonstrated sustained excellence in undergraduate advising and will have made a significant impact on their undergraduate advisees’ intellectual development through sustained academic advising relationships.”

https://advising.uconn.edu/outstanding-undergraduate-advisor-awards/

Information about the 2022 Undergraduate Advising Awards can be found here, along with Lauren’s bio:

Lauren Munyard
Academic Advisor, Department of Economics, CLAS

Lauren has been an advisor for 18 years, including at Boston University’s College of Communication and at UConn for 15 years as an advisor at the School of Business, Departments of Communication, Sociology, and Economics and at the CLAS Academic Services Center which serves as CLAS’ central advising office. She specializes in working with a large population of students, using techniques and tools she has learned through advising in different areas along with innovation to best serve the needs of many students while making them feel like an individual.  Currently she advises in Economics, one of the largest majors in CLAS. She started the Uconnomist undergraduate e-newsletter, has been working on developing a peer advising system in her department and has helped to create and put into place many new systems and processes to help make a large advising office run. In her past, Lauren developed an advising center from the ground up and hired and led its student workers, graduate assistants and advisors as the department doubled in size in majors. She has supervised many graduate assistants who were learning the advising profession. She has also worked with majors at the Regional campuses and works extensively with many international students who have unique needs given the pandemic and travel restrictions. She supervises student workers and manages the free tutoring program, manages the enrollment and permission number process, and is on the Undergraduate Programs Committee and the committee for the Economics Department Undergraduate Awards.

She also manages the Program Plan Change program for CLAS and processes major and advisor changes for the school, manages the ECE and non-degree courses for CLAS and their application to the students’ degrees, serves as the university contact for final plans of study issues and workflow and is on the University’s Nexus Steering Committee that works to help evolve the Nexus program to suit the needs of UConn academic advisors. Lauren has offered many workshops to the advising community, including instructional trainings on Student Admin, Nexus, Excel tips, and how to advise large majors and serves as an advisor resource for Nexus questions and troubleshooting.

Lauren studied Communication at Houghton College and Boston University as well as earned minors in Writing and Business.  Lauren attended the State University of New York at Oswego before transferring to Houghton College her sophomore year. As she understands the complexities transfer students face from changing colleges, she especially enjoys working with the transfer student population to help make their transition to their new school as seamless as possible. Throughout her advising career, she has been a student group advisor for multiple groups that do volunteer activities. Lauren’s passion is for animals and she volunteers her time working with animal rescues.

Frontiers in Undergraduate Research 2022 at Storrs

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Griffin O'Neill PosterGriffin O’Neill, a senior with a double major in Economics and Geography, presented a poster visualizing data on the topic of National Football League (NFL) Attendance and Anthem Protests in 2016.

Using the ArcGIS, software, Griffin plotted a base map representing the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) of each NFL stadium and the change in home game attendance between the 2015 and 2016 seasons. Then in separate maps he overlaid on the base map the number of player anthem protests for each team, the number of police shootings of unarmed black men in the SMSA of the home team, and voting results in the 2016 Presidential election in the counties comprising the SMSA of the home team.

The poster was part of an independent study project conducted with Prof. Oskar Harmon.

Brookings Event on Immigration and Care for Aging Baby Boomers

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On Tuesday, April 19th , Professor Furtado will participate in a webinar, “Who will care for aging baby boomers? Immigrants,” organized by the Center on Children and Families at Brookings. She will discuss her research on the relationship between immigrant labor and the quality of care provided in nursing homes.  Others will discuss how immigrants make it easier for the elderly to “age-in-place” and for the children of elderly parents to remain in the labor force.

After the presentations, a panel of immigration and health care experts will discuss the country’s caregiving needs and policies that can help address them.

If you are interested in participating, register here. During the live event, viewers can submit questions via email to events@brookings.edu or on Twitter using #FutureofCaregiving.

Graphic for 'Who Will Care for Aging Baby Boomers?' Event

Frontiers in Undergraduate Research 2022 at Stamford

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Stamford Frontiers in Undergraduate Research PosterThis year, marking the 25th anniversary of the Frontiers in Undergraduate Research Program at UConn, the Stamford campus had the first inaugural Frontiers event on April 12. The Frontiers program creates a culture of inquiry and engagement and enriches the undergraduate experience of our students.

At Stamford, students’ presentations were in-person and guests from the local community were invited. Twelve Stamford students from various disciplines delivered results of eight diverse research projects they have undertaken during this academic year.

Dr. Smirnova’s student, Matthew Gilshteyn, presented his research entitled “How Will Infrastructure Act Impact Nuclear Energy Production Costs?”, which stems from his work in ECON 3431W – “Public Economics” class. In his paper, Matthew conducted regression analysis on the data from U.S. Department of Energy and Nuclear Energy Institute and using the regression equation estimated the costs of nuclear energy production for 2022 and 2023. Matthew concluded that the Infrastructure Act’s allocation of resources towards alternative energy will decrease the cost of nuclear energy production by 8.2% by 2023. During the Frontiers event, Matthew answered questions from the audience and defended the nuclear energy as the safest energy source compared with other sources.

This year, the “posters” that students developed were in the electronic format and were projected on a big screen at the Welcome Center Atrium at the Stamford campus. Those posters will now be shown till the end of the semester on the monitors in the Concourse rotating among all eight projects.

The inaugural Frontiers event at the Stamford campus showcased the diversity of talent of our students and the continuing effort of the faculty to strengthen the undergraduate research program.

Thank you to the Office of Undergraduate Research and the Honors Program for organizing this beneficial event at the Stamford campus.

Smirnova and Gilshteyn at Frontiers in Undergraduate Research EventPhoto: Dr. Smirnova (left) and Matthew Gilshteyn at the Frontiers in Undergraduate Research event in Stamford, April 12, 2022.

Recent PhD publishes in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

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Recent PhD graduate Fei Zou has published “Does Early Retirement Really Benefit Women?” in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

This paper grew out of Fei’s PhD dissertation completed at UConn (2019) under the supervision of Professor Kai Zhao. It is a joint work with Dr. Hyun Lee (former UConn faculty), and Professor Zhao.

In this paper, the authors quantitatively evaluate the welfare consequences of China’s gender-specific mandatory retirement policy using a calibrated overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets. They find that while it is intended to relieve women from work earlier and to provide them with more years of public pensions benefits than men, early mandatory retirement reduces welfare for women.

The published version of this paper can be found at:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268122000452

Professor Smirnova at Career Everywhere Event

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Becoming Career ReadyOn April 7, 2022, Dr. Smirnova presented at the UConn Career Champions’ training event “Working with the Career Center to get Employers & Alumni into the Classroom”.

Dr. Smirnova provided the evidence from the National Alumni Career Mobility Survey, 2020, collected by the Career Leadership Collective that “receiving helpful career advice during an undergraduate degree is a significant contributor to educational satisfaction as well as to career pathway preparation. It plays an important role in economic mobility and career satisfaction.” (NACM, 2020)

She discussed how her courses’ learning objectives are aligned with several Career Competencies developed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): Teamwork / Collaboration; Professionalism / Work Ethics; and Career Management Skills.

Dr. Smirnova shared examples of her work with Alumni and Stamford business leaders, which was aimed to help other Career Champions provide invaluable resources, connections, and experiences for our students as they venture on their career journeys.

European Economic Review Publishes Professor Furtado’s Paper on Work Norms and SSDI Take-Up

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Professor Delia Furtado’s paper “Who Goes on Disability when Times are Tough? The Role of Work Norms among Immigrants” has been published in the European Economic Review.

The paper considers how people’s views about the importance of work affect decisions to go on disability in response to rising unemployment rates.

See Professor Furtado’s tweets about the paper here.

Professor Harmon Awarded AAUP Teaching Excellence Career Award

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Professor Oskar Harmon has been awarded the 2022 Teaching Excellence: Career Award from the UConn-AAUP, one of only two recipients in the university. The recipients were chosen by the UConn-AAUP Excellence Awards Committee from a pool of excellent candidates.

The recognition of faculty teaching, research, and service excellence through UConn-AAUP awards began in 1997. The intention of the awards is to showcase academic excellence at UConn.

A virtual ZOOM ceremony to honor Professor Harmon, and other UConn-AAUP award recipients, will take place on Monday, April 25th at 12:00 noon.  Any and all who wish to attend are welcome, and are asked to email Barbara Kratochvil to receive the ZOOM link.

 

Writing-Intensive Class is Visited by a Writer

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Professor Smirnova’s ECON 3431W – Public Finance Writing Intensive class was visited in March by a professional writer and entrepreneur, UConn Stamford Economics major alumna, Anne McAuley Lopez (CLAS ’96). Ms. Lopez, is a business owner of Agency Content Writer, LLC.

Company Logo for Agency Content Writer

Writing-intensive courses are always challenging for students. Professor Smirnova’s class focuses on writing a scientific research paper in economics, which is often the first time a student is exposed to a scientific writing approach. It is overwhelming for students to face a fast-paced environment of selecting a topic, formulating a research question or a hypothesis, conducting literature review, obtaining and analyzing data to find the answer to the research question or accept or reject the hypothesis. All of that with the emphasis on scientific writing with in-text citations and a proper bibliography.

Ms. Anne Lopez volunteered to help with the inspiration of students several years ago. She worked with Dr. Smirnova to prepare a series of videos that motivate students along their research journey. These videos are now on HuskyCT site for this course. This year, Anne came to the class itself, albeit virtually.

On that evening in March, Anne started by sharing her story about how she changed her career from financial analyst (she was an Economics major!) to a writer. On her company website, Anne writes: “Since my earliest years, I remember loving writing. Teachers would give us options of telling stories visually with poster boards and markers or with words. I always chose words.” She told students that she discovered that people value her writing and would ask her for help. Eventually, she decided to change her career and since September 2010, she has been a professional writer, helping businesses get found online.

Students were appreciative to hear Anne’s wisdom about being open to change and being flexible. Another advice: find what you are passionate about, and that passion complemented by hard work will lead you to success.

In the second part of the evening, Ms. Lopez talked with students about their selected topics and recommended several strategies of how to cope with writer’s block, find inspiration in reading, and how to “eat an elephant” (you have to be in class to know what that means!). Students responded well to her allegories and had fun discussing their challenges with writing in this class.

Such visits from UConn alumni are very valuable. They connect students to the real-world and to UConn graduates, especially if those graduates pursued the same major while in college. The stories of career trajectories, the stories of workplace dynamics are inspiring and insightful. For the alumni, such visits give the opportunity to connect with younger generation, to share successes and challenges, and to give back to the University.

Thank you, Ms. Lopez, for your work with us!

Catching up with UConn MSQE Alumnus Alex Gu and the NABE

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Alex Gu picture

Launched in June 2020, the National Association of Business Economists (NABE) Scholars program expands on current NABE Foundation scholarship programs by providing scholarships to NABE conferences specifically to minority students and early-career economists to attend NABE conferences and events.

In its inaugural year, UConn’s Alex Gu was one of 20 selected scholars.

Alex recently graduated from UConn, earning his Master of Science in Quantitative Economics (MSQE) in December of 2021. We recently spoke with Alex to hear his reflections on the benefits of the program, his experience with the NABE conferences, and his advice for current (and potential) students.

We asked him: Why did you choose UConn?

“In high school, two of my most influential teachers were UConn Alumni. They encouraged me to check out UConn’s programs, and I knew I wanted to attend somewhere on the East Coast (having lived in Texas, California and China). I attended first as an undergrad, then decided to continue with MSQE program.”

Alex feels the MSQE program prepared him well, equipping him with tangible skills that he will be using regularly: Practice in coding with Python, R, and Stata; working with machine learning models; prediction models; and convex optimization. He credits Professor Oskar Harmon’s Writing and Communication for Economics and Business class, as well as UConn’s Career Center, for preparing him for the dozens of interviews he has been going on as he enters the job market. “The MSQE program prepared me well for the technical questions, and the Career Center helped prepare me for the behavioral questions.”

Through the NABE Scholarship program, Alex was able to attend conferences in Washington D.C. that allowed him attend discussions with representatives from top companies on pressing current issues such as the supply chain, and the future of transportation. He enjoyed the opportunity to meet in-person, and make connections with leaders in the industry. “I realize how important networking is, as well as the importance of constant learning.”

Alex encourages current and potential students to use the resources UConn provides and to never stop practicing to keep your skills sharp. He intends to take the CBE exam in the coming months, and looks forward to taking the next steps in his career.

Check out these scholarship opportunities and more by visiting the NABE website here, and thank you Alex Gu for your enthusiasm and insight.

The 2022 NABE Scholar application process will open in late March/early April – stay tuned for details!

UConn students who are awarded a scholarship to attend a NABE event can apply to the MSQE Scholarship Program (contact Lisa Foss for details) to partially offset travel and lodging costs.