Monday 2 March 2015

Feeling Chuffed Again

I'm looking forward to doing my first lecture at Victoria University today, so I hope it is not disloyal to write a post celebrating the success of students from the University of Canterbury.

Last year, I wrote celebrating post-graduate successes of students from my Honours class of 2009, and lauding the diversity of the Canterbury programme that emphasised both analytical rigour and traditional liberal arts learning. This year, the cause for celebration is the recent graduate recruitment round by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Three students who were in my intermediate-micro-with-calculus sequence in 2013, Amy Rice, Michael Callaghan, and Simon Greenwood, were successful in securing positions at the RBNZ for 2016 in the early-bird recruitment round for the RBNZ. My understanding is that they were the only three students in New Zealand to receive such offers. Two of them, Amy and Michael, also received Reserve Bank scholarships for their Honours year in 2015.

These successes continues the astonishing record Canterbury has had in placing students into the RBNZ over the past decade. Sadly, this might be one of the last cohorts from Canterbury to enjoy this success. As a result of the financial difficulties following the earthquake, management there has decided that the Department needs to focus on its broad-based B.Com. Accordingly, it no longer offers micro with calculus at the second year, has cancelled its Arts-style current-economic issues course, and has introduced a new Bachelor of Business Economics major targeted at a different group of students. In the current financial environment with a much smaller department, it was probably necessary for Canterbury to narrow its focus, but I hope they are able to return to offering its top students a strong maths-based, liberal-arts-consistent programme. The country needs rigorously trained economists with multi-disciplinary grounding. Fortunately, Otago, Vic and Auckland still offer calculus-based micro at the second year.

7 comments:

  1. Amy and Simon did my Econ & Current Policy Issues in 2013 as well. Good times. Congrats to all three.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is way too close to the truth for young journalists working in New Zealand today.


    I know of one who took a pay cut from his part-time job flipping hamburgers at McDonalds. At McDonalds he was paid an hourly rate for his work, 40 hours meant 40 times that rate. At his first newspaper job he was expected to do up to 10 hours a week on top of his contractual hours for no additional payment. That's bad enough, but the hourly rate was $1 and some change less than he got for serving burgers

    ReplyDelete
  3. Further congrats from someone who recently trod that path. Another success for the gnomes of Canterbury (http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2009/12/gnomes-of-canterbury.html).

    ReplyDelete
  4. James' link has a trailing ")" which invalidates it. Try http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/gnomes-of-canterbury.html


    And yes, I am proud to have had Richard Manning as my Ph.D. supervisor.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hasn't done the RBNZ much good. Rodney Dickens leaves them for dead.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Isn't business economics something of an oxymoron? I really don't see what economics has to offer business. Accounting, yes; finance, yes; management, yes; but economics?

    ReplyDelete
  7. More than anything, I would say John Key can't stand the look of "Act had to bring it up".

    It would make Key look pathetic if he was to be seen taking ACT's publicised lead on this issue. Key has to be seen as the 'bigger man', calling all the big shots.

    Politically speaking, I think this whole issue will be profitable for ACT but costly for National, regardless. Either way you go, Key had to lose, because he has to defend a stupid historical promise too-absolutely set in stone.

    My advice to ACT from here on in, would be to keep putting the boot in on this issue. Keep hitting National where it hurts.

    ReplyDelete