Unicast

I have now been at the University of Copenhagen. The Economics Department is pretty big — there are 45 permanent faculty and approx. 1,700 students; 243 began the program this year. We are organized into 8 groups of around 30 students. Teaching is a mixture of lectures and classes.

The people are generally nice but vary in age and background. A handful are fresh out of high school. Others are much older. My impression is that they come to the program with different motivations and ambitions. Some are typical politicos; others have chosen economics because it seemed less than the alternatives. I don't think there are a lot of people who study economics because they think it is fun, but I guess the love for the subject will come later. Statistically more than a third will not complete the course, but it is harder than one would think to identify who they are.

I have four courses this semester: Micro, Math, Business Economics and a social studies course. We will have macro and statistics next semester. The math progresses at a reasonable pace; after a month it is starting to go beyond what a learned in IB. The micro course is formal, but not yet mathematical (that will come in the second year); it is formal in the sense that we start to a large extent from first principles.

I sent an email to a recent graduate of the PhD program at MIT. In the admissions process they are looking for students who are not just “good students”; they want applicants who have genuine aptitude and love for research. They also want to see recommendations from people whom they trust. It will be challenging to demonstrate this in the relatively rigid structure of the BA.