Bridging classroom and real world

California’s Senate took a hundred days to pass the budget, but students in Economics 106A had just 14 days to analyze it.

Fifty-one undergraduates will present the results of their in-depth evaluations of the budget to a panel of business professionals at the UCLA case competition on Saturday. The competition is the culmination of Economics in Practice, a new economics course designed to give students real-world practice in business research and presentation.

Andrew Atkeson, the director of the business economics program, said this course is a pilot for broader changes he is hoping to make to the program. Economics in Practice teaches presentational skills, teamwork and the ability to deal with real data through lectures by business professionals and other case studies. Atkeson said he eventually hopes to attach practical seminars to all of the major’s upper-division classes.

Mark Lam, a fourth-year business economics student, has spent the last few days preparing for Saturday’s event. His team is focusing on the obstacles the budget will face in the future, namely how the cost of pensions and health care are detrimental to California’s fiscal problems.

Lam said he and his group researched and analyzed publications from California’s Congressional Budget Office and the California Department of Finance. They also talked to reporters from The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to gain a better understanding of how to interpret the raw data.

“As an economics major, it starts to feel like everything is just theory,” Lam said about upper-division classes.

Economics in Practice stands out because it teaches practical business skills and allows Lam to explore public sector finance, he said.

Nick Rasines, a fourth-year business economics student, worked with Atkeson to make Economics in Practice a reality. Rasines was a student in the pilot class last spring and said he found the exposure to business professionals the most useful part of the class.

“You can use work from a class to advance your own career,” Rasines said of the case competitions. “It’s about getting an “˜A,’ but also about getting a (job) interview.”

During the competition, students have a chance to network with the judges, including representatives from Deloitte Consulting and Goldman Sachs.

Proposed coursework changes will focus on improving four areas: writing, communication, teamwork and exposure to messy real-world scenarios.

“The intent is to address the most common feedback from employers, which is that students don’t know how to write (and) don’t know how to speak,” Atkeson said.

Atkeson surveyed employers of recent UCLA graduates to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the undergraduate business program. Employers generally responded that while UCLA students had excellent critical thinking and applied math skills, they were inadequately prepared for presentations, public speaking and team-oriented projects.

If the Academic Senate approves the proposal, next year’s entering freshmen class will be the first to experience these changes, Atkeson said.

Currently, however, Atkeson and Katrina Davy, career counselor for the economics department, are focused on providing more competitive internship experiences for undergraduates and improving relations with alumni.

Next quarter, the UCLA Career Center is launching Career Coaching, a program geared toward second-year and transfer students that will match underclassmen with young alumni. Career Coaching will give students the chance to get information about potential professions early in their academic careers, Davy said.

“We have an amazing pool of alumni, and we want to find a way to engage and involve them,” Davy said. “They have a lot of insight to give students.”

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