The most challenging but also the most interesting class rn is definitely Econometrics. Ngl I feel like I bombed the midterm BUT I see the potential for improvement. A couple of weeks ago our professor brought in Guido Imbens (Brown PhD & 2021 Nobel Laureate!) to give us a guest lecture. The way we are taught the discipline of econometrics right now is entirely based on his work! For some background, since economists can’t actually conduct truly random experiments in a lab to test their questions, they have to rely on "natural experiments" happening in the real world. But the real world is super messy, and standard statistics can usually only show you correlations, not true cause-and-effect. Imbens created the mathematical toolkit to clean up that messy data so economists can establish the true cause-and-effect relationships. My other favorite class is a 7-person seminar on Environmental Risk in Finance. I really love how the professor blends behavioral economics, stats, and environmental science all together so we can examine the world of risk management through an environmental lens. The final project seems pretty exciting too. We're working to produce something similar to a traditional corporate credit rating report, but specifically grading environmental risk. The class has also been making me look at the world differently because of the readings. We’ve been focusing a lot on behavioral economics, and so far my favorites were Black Swan and Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. Highly recommend them if you want to go through an existential crisis!