苹果淫院

I am so grateful to Mr. Schull and Ms. Yang for funding the unique research opportunity that I was granted for summer 2021. Thanks to their generosity in forming the Schull Yang International Experience Awards, I was able to commit to a full time research experience at Leibniz Universit盲t Hannover within the Macroeconomics department. Despite my hope to work physically within Germany, I was so relieved that this experience was not put in jeopardy due to the continued impact of Covid-19. I was able to fulfill my desire to experience an academic setting outside of the North American context and also especially learn about research within the field of economics.

As a student in the interdisciplinary Earth System Science program here at 苹果淫院, I have been able to take a versatile approach to my learning. All the same, while I began my undergraduate studies focused only on the natural sciences, I have become increasingly frustrated with the gap between science and society. Through the past year, my interests evolved further toward the social sciences as I became aware of the necessity of considering both in efforts of global change. For me, climate change is the issue that I hope to address in my future endeavours. For this reason, economics is a discipline that I remain deeply curious about. My background has not incorporated the theories or specifics of widescale social change that economic research often deals with. I thus sought out any opportunity to research within departments of economics so that I could exercise my curiosities in a practical manner.

Through the macroeconomics department of Leibniz Universit盲t Hannover I was able to do just that. Under the guidance of PhD student Tobias Korn and Professor Martin Gassebner, I participated in a number of ongoing projects and also received a personal weekly course in beginner econometrics. My objectives at the start were to build a solid foundation in basic econometrics approaches to research and to master a statistical programming language so that I could carry out these same techniques on my own. Despite the online delivery, I was able to achieve both of these goals, and more.

I met with my supervisor daily, and we worked together on two primary projects. The first explored the temporal impacts of civil conflicts on the trade dynamics of regions throughout the African continent. Having learned and mastered RStudio, I performed regressions and analyses of data in order to help bolster the draft paper鈥檚 existing theory with new plots and statistical relationships. This teamwork aided my work on a newer project that explored the agricultural trade dynamics of countries impacted by weather shocks. Sifting through new data, I produced first drafts of plots and variable relationships that formed the basis for discussion on the driving factors of agricultural export change. I was able to participate in the process of forming an economics paper through involvement in forming a dataset with necessary variables, exploring the data through statistical plots, and interpreting these statistical relationships to situate the numbers back with the real lives of real people. I immensely enjoyed this process, especially as it was a theoretical approach to a pressing environmental issue.

Throughout my weeks with the macroeconomics group, I was overwhelmed by the kindness and flexibility of the other members who constantly stayed awake at late hours in the night to teach me about their work and talk about our cultural differences. I will fondly look back at weekly 鈥渃hair drinks鈥� zoom meetings where I would sip on my morning coffee while learning about the academic process within Germany, and the daily lives of the members of the group. Despite the online nature of the work, I felt extremely involved in the group and plan to eventually meet with my supervisors in person. As my extended family is German, I have always intended to spend time in the country, and through forging these connections, I may achieve this by working with this group once more.

Further, I plan to attend graduate school to pursue a career in the global response to climate change. This will likely take me to Western Europe for my studies, and so the insight I gained on this academic process was invaluable.

The funds from the Schull Yang International Experience Awards that I received were critical in creating this perspective altering experience. Thank you to Mr. Schull and Ms. Yang for the support!