John Hicks Econ 490 Fall 2019

I consider myself a social creature, and thus teamwork is often enjoyable and fruitful for me. In a college setting most teamwork revolves around group projects. I find that I have the most success with group projects when I have a genuine connection with each and every member- this leads to an emotional bond that most people feel uncomfortable throwing away for the sake of laziness/not doing their work. One of my favorite group projects was one done in one of the first econ classes I’d ever taken; some lower level econ courses are required for a wide range of majors, so I had many real-life friends in this course as well.  The project was Excel heavy and full of necessary research, so we all had our own little portions to do. The project was meant to culminate in a giant paper that needed graphs, linear regressions, and data coupled with the writing portions (introduction, breaking down our model, the results, conclusions, etc.). These various tasks were delegated to each mem...

This was a fun hypothetical to consider. In Fall 2017 there were 47,826 students; almost 50,000 people in a concentrated area with limited resources often leads to a situation in which there is scarcity or long waits. When brainstorming potential uses for Illinibucks I found the most significant ones to be: mental health appointments (specifically at McKinley), class registration, and space/tables in study buildings (often Grainger, the UGL, Siebel, the Transportation Building, etc.).  Mental health appointments and the difficulty of being able to book one is something that personally affects me quite a lot. I’ve noticed that, as the years have passed (I’m a senior now), it’s gotten harder and harder to find availability. Even harder is finding an appointment within the timeframe of a month from calling. This is something I know to be extremely detrimental for many of my friends/peers who suffer from mental health issues, and thus I think it’s a prime candidate for Illinibucks...

Being a college student provides many chances to act in an unethically opportunistic manner. Classes are difficult and professors assign countless assignment, seemingly unaware of other classes their students are inevitably taking. This leads to working together, sharing documents, finding past assignments/exams online, etc.- all of which fall under the umbrella of cheating. To address the prompt in depth, I’ll explain one specific example of such a scenario. During my sophomore year of college, I enrolled in an upper level political science course. The professor had glowing reviews on RateMyProfessor- students mostly mentioned how lenient, kind, and sweet she was. Although I'm usually skeptical of the reviews on that website (I think scorned students and “teacher’s pet” student heavily populate those that write the reviews) they were enough to push me to sign up for her class.  The structure of her class was similar to others I’d taken: PowerPoint lectures, supplemental w...

            When I was in high school, I watched a YouTube video of an entrepreneur motivating the audience to be go-getters. He urged those watching to not wait to participate in things but rather be the leaders who start companies and movements themselves. I was extremely pumped by this video and thus, after brainstorming about what topics I found most important, I settled on an idea: to gather a group of my peers who would, on a weekly basis, travel to the elementary schools in the poorest parts of town to read to the children in the afterschool programs. It was easy enough to find willing participants; college applications were right around the corner and this would undoubtedly look great on a resume. The experience was incredibly rewarding- the students, parents, and administrators of the various schools would thank us endlessly. Parents would come up to me and tell me how they were working multiple jobs to support thei...

John Hicks was an incredibly impactful academic. Born in England to a journalist father, Hicks contributed many concepts and works to the world of economics- eventually earning himself and fellow economist Kenneth Arrow the Nobel Prize in this arena. In 1939, Hicks published his book “Value and Capital”. His work was one of the first to delve into the ideas surrounding general equilibrium theory, and also outlined the distinction between the substitution effect and the income effect.  Another major contribution of this economist is his invention of the IS-LM model, a graphical summary of the Keynesian understanding of macroeconomics; his analysis of the four markets (goods, labor, credit and money) was published in an economics journal of 1937. Hicks was also a notable professor, teaching at prestigious universities such as the London School of Economics, the University of Manchester, and Oxford University. I was aware of John Hicks before this assignment, due to the vario...

This is probably the most genuinely fun component of a 400 level Econ course I've ever had the joy of participating in.