Five graduating seniors comprised a team honored for superior work in ECO 4400: Economic Consulting.
Five graduating seniors in the Class of 2024 were honored this spring by the Department of Economics with its “Best Capstone in Economic Consulting” award.
Nick Esposito, Ally Hogan, Tanner Holliman, Kaleigh Kreimeyer and CJ LaDue 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 Using Economic Data – Are We Ready When the Request for Proposal is Released,” asked students to participate in a capture effort for a potential 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 about veterans that would encourage an academic consultant to join the team
- compete in multi-round short presentations where their peers and instructor judged recommendations
“In proposal capture efforts like these, early career economists get to explore how consulting firms prepare for future proposals in advance,” said Assistant Professor Brooks Depro, who teaches the course. “This year’s ‘best capstone’ included an innovative question about generational differences in veteran’s choice to enter the technology sector and a persuasive recommendation for their project manager.”