Five graduating seniors comprised a team honored for superior work in ECO 4400: Economic Consulting.
Five graduating seniors in the Class of 2023 were honored this spring by the Department of Economics with its “Best Capstone in Economic Consulting” award.
Jason Holquist, Jane Ragland, David Sawyer, Colin Wightman and Leiu Yuenyong completed the winning research proposal for ECO 4400: Economic Consulting.
Economic Consulting helps students further develop their data visualization skills, and it provides practical applications for the techniques learned in econometrics to analyze client data. Teams create professional business memos and advise a client with a report and presentation that summarizes findings with visual displays and analytics.
This year’s project, “Research on Small Business Topics on Women Entrepreneurship – Are We Ready When the Request for Proposal is Released?,” asked students to participate in a capture effort for an upcoming fall proposal from the U.S. Small Business Administration. Students were asked to:
- identify an appropriate individual-level data set and organize it for analysis
- choose a question that would encourage an academic consultant to join the team
- compete in a multi-round short presentations where their peers and instructor judged recommendations
“In proposal capture efforts like these, early career economists select and prepare the best materials that a proposal leader can use once the proposal ‘drops,'” said Assistant Professor Brooks Depro, who teaches the course. “This year’s ‘best capstone’ included an innovative question and a persuasive recommendation for their project manager.”