Gerard DiPippo '08, Claudio LoCascio '08 and Monica Yu '08 travelled to Washington, D.C. last weekend to present term papers from their senior seminar on topics ranging from the impact of jetlag on international trade to the effects of corruption on foreign investment. The students, along with peer economists, participated at the Carroll Round, an annual conference on international economics hosted by Georgetown University.
The conference is a forum for honors undergraduate students to present their senior theses or related projects. Sixteen universities from the United States, Britain and Canada were represented at the event this year. In its fifth consecutive year of participation, Dartmouth brought the second-highest number of students to the conference.
The conference also provided an opportunity to network with students who shared similar interests, DiPippo said.
"It was great to be able to have nerdy economics conversations with people who are into the same nerdy economics topics," DiPippo said. "I felt right at home."
The conference also included roundtable discussions with prominent economists, including development economist Steven Radelet and international trade expert Philip Levy, the conference's keynote speaker. Students were able to speak with Susan Athey, who became the first woman to win the John Bates Clark medal last year -- an award given by the American Economic Association to people under age 40 who have made significant contributions to the study of economics. Some say Athey may go on to be the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. DiPippo added it was exciting having the opportunity to meet her.
Dartmouth economics professor Nancy Marion chose the students who attended the Carroll Round. Of 30 students in her senior seminar on international economics, Marion chose the three who wrote the best term papers, DiPippo said. The students then applied to the conference with her sponsorship and were accepted. Marion was not available for comment.
The conference allowed students to see what a career in academic economics is like, LoCascio said.
"It was a good preview to the setup, the way it's very structured," LoCascio said. "You have a series of presentations, followed by lectures, and it was pretty well structured with events constantly going on."
Because Dartmouth does not require students to write a senior thesis, the papers LoCascio, DiPippo and Yu presented were shorter in length than the theses some of the other students presented, LoCascio said.
Despite the difference in length, the papers the Dartmouth students presented were comparable in quality to the other students' theses, DiPippo said.
"It was just our senior seminar level paper, but I actually found that what Dartmouth considers to be senior seminar level is roughly equivalent to an honors thesis at many of the other universities," DiPippo said.
He added that the most valuable part of the weekend was interacting with other students.
"I think I'll probably stay in contact with a bunch of the people because they were really cool," DiPippo said. "I felt right at home."
