what's it like to study economics at university?

W.H.T

I want to know about this as I'm still in the process of deciding what to study at university.

If you're an economics student, please tell me, what sort of work you are given, what your lectures and tutorials consist of, give examples of what you've learnt etc etc...., basically describe your experience of studying this course.

thanks

(edited 13 years ago)

bump

This question has been asked before. :p:

But anyway...

I have 12 hours per week, 8 of which are lectures and 4 are tutorials. In lectures the actual content is covered by the lecturer whereas in the tutorials we go over homeworks and also get the chance to ask for help if needed. Also certain modules have surgery sessions where we can go and ask for extra help if we’re really stuck.

The content is broadly microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics. Micro is short problems, often resolved in a mathematical manner, whereas macro tends to be short answers accompanied by diagrams. In econometrics, it’s just mathematical problem sets.

In terms of what I’ve learnt... Not much! :p:

Seriously, though, giving precise examples off the top of my head is a bit difficult. In micro, it’s often optimization problems (different bundles of goods to maximise utility; quantities to produce to minimise costs or maximise profits subject to constraints); in macro, it’s often policy problems; in econometrics, to give a random example, you’ll be looking at generating functions to find moments (mean, variance, kurtosis, etc.) or prove two distributions are the same, or you’ll use maximum likelihood to show that lambda is the mean of a Poisson distribution.

As for my experience of the course, it’s been good fun, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.