Good afternoon everyone, welcome to this subject talk for economics at Birmingham.
My name is Ceri Davis, I'm a lecturer in economics but I'm also Undergraduate Admissions Tutor for the
department, so I'll be talking you through our programmes today.
So before I go any further, let me define which programmes I'm talking about in this
presentation. So these are the degree programmes that
are managed by the Department of Economics
and at the top there I've listed BSc Economics - that's our largest
programme and so I put that one first, but we also
offer a range of other programmes. For example, BSc Money, Banking and Finance
combines elements of economics with accounting, banking and finance.
BSc Mathematical Economics and Statistics goes into more detail on some
of the mathematical elements of economics and I'll talk about those in
more detail later on. Then we have two language programmes you
can study - BSc Economics with German or BSc Economics with Spanish -
these are four-year programmes, the languages programmes, because you spend
your third year studying economics abroad in either
German or Spanish. The other programmes on this list are
three-year programmes, last but not least we have a joint
honors programme, BSc Economics and Political Science,
this programme is 50% economics, 50% political science.
Now, in the short time that I have today, as you can imagine I won't be able to go
into full detail about every detail for each of the six
programmes listed here but each programme has its own web page.
So, for the duration of the talk I'm going to be referring to all of these
programmes - there are six here because there are two language programmes of
course, so anything I say refers to all of these programmes for the remainder of the talk.
So let me take a step back and just ask what
is economics? Some of you may be studying economics at school or college at
the moment and that's great if you are, but we don't require it for any of our
programmes - we do not ask for or require A Level
Economics, so some of you will be more familiar than others with
what we mean by economics and what we study in economics.
So on this slide i've got the American Economic Association's definition,
although there are many, many definitions that you can find, but I
thought that these two are particularly good.
Economics is the study of how people use scarce resources
and respond to incentives, or stated another way
economics is the study of decision making and choices.
Now, when we think of scarce resources we could be thinking at an individual level,
that could be your individual income or perhaps
your household income, or we might be thinking at a national or
a global level. In terms of natural resources you'll
find that economics can be applied to a broad range of topics,
some you might expect, others perhaps are less expected.
At the top of the slide there I have Adam Smith who
is considered to be really the founding father of economics with his 1776
work. So economics is a relatively young discipline compared to say
physics or chemistry, but of course it has evolved a lot
over the intervening time period and you'll be studying the
cutting edge of economics - you'll be looking at
cutting-edge research as I go through. So economics gives us quite a powerful
framework, it can help us to understand the world, essentially
whether that's the past current global events
or even to anticipate future challenges and opportunities, and I'll show you some
examples of those as we go through.
Why study economics? Well, it's interesting, firstly -
although you'd expect me to say that - it's also very varied
as I will show you in the next two slides.
It's also highly relevant to the real world, so at the top
of the slide there I have a screenshot from the Birmingham Heroes
campaign - the lady on the left is Professor Kim Scharf, she's our Head of
Department, the head of economics, and she was recognised
nationally and internationally for her research on the economics of
charitable giving and the economics of financial inclusion.
So economics can have a real world impact, it resonates with policy-makers
and it can affect change in the world. The second reason why it's important to
study economics or why I think economics is a good degree discipline to
follow is the range of skills that it's going
to give you. So as an economic student you will
develop both quantitative and qualitative skills. This combination is
highly valued by employers if you're looking ahead to your future career
intentions and we're going to hear from the Careers Network in a separate talk
so I won't say too much about that but if you have a look at any graduate
earnings table, you tend to find that medicine and
dentistry is at the top and then economics is usually in second or third
place in terms of average earnings. Why is that? Well, because economics
graduates possess this strong combination of both
quantitative and qualitative skills and when we ask employers
they tell us that economic students have the skills that
they need to thrive in the workplace so that's
a clear reflection, under either measure.
People often think that economics is only about finance or money,
it can be about that but not necessarily so. On this first slide actually I've
included some of the more traditional
economics topics whether that's monetary policy, you've got the Bank of England
there at the top left, fiscal policy, unemployment, international
trade, financial markets. You will study these
on one of our economics programmes and indeed these are very important topics
in economics, but economics is about
more than that and at Birmingham we have a large department,
we have around 50 academic staff, so there are people who will be teaching
you, people who are conducting research into
economics, and because of the size of our department we have a broad range
of expertise. So I know from reading many personal
statements over the years, a lot of students are interested in things like
environmental economics - we have a strong research group in
environmental economics and that feeds through to your teaching.
If you look at the centre picture there, that's supposed to represent
climate change, and in environmental economics we have a group of researchers
who work on the economics of crime - that's an important area where economic
tools can be applied to help policymakers achieve better outcomes.
I've mentioned charitable giving already, that's supposed to be the picture at the
top left of the slide and then the clock there is supposed to
represent time, so I spoke about scarce resources - our
household income, perhaps natural resources, but actually
time is also a scarce resource - we're all trying to allocate our time
as efficiently as we can so actually economics brings in the fact that time
is a scarce resource and we want to spend it
as as efficiently as we can. There is even a big economics literature
on the economics of sport and I've chosen football as an example here but
the tools of economics can be applied to really any professional team sport
and indeed individual sports as well. So there is a big literature on it, the
economics of sport which is something you might not immediately expect
and then another scarce resource that we use when making decisions every day of
course is information, and there's a lot of discussion in the
media these days about false information and how that can spread through social
media or through other platforms. This idea of fake news and indeed in
economics, we have people doing research into
the importance of information to people when making choices. The
picture at the bottom right hand side of
the slide is supposed to show the Coronavirus, ongoing events,
topical events that policymakers want answers to right away.
At Birmingham and in the Department of Economics your
teaching experience is going to be informed by the latest research
in the field, so the University of Birmingham was awarded the Teaching
Excellence Framework gold standard when the most recent assessment was completed
and one of the things the assessors picked up on was the strength of our
research-informed teaching, and that's true in the Department of Economics as
well. So your lecturers, the people who are
teaching you, will be conducting research in the field - that's how you know they
are experts in what they do. In other words that's how you know that
you're getting a high quality experience and that you are
learning the latest information. So our lecturers
are leading researchers in their fields, internationally recognised for their
work. This directly informs our teaching, it's also important when you get to the
final year because final year students will write what we call an extended
essay. In other universities they may call this
a dissertation - we call it an extended essay
and students will work one-to-one with an academic member of staff
on a research topic of their choice. So obviously it's really
important then that we have a broad range of expertise in the department
so that students are able to work on topics that they're really interested in,
not only that but there are also exciting opportunities for students to
participate in our research at Birmingham- we have the behavioral
experimental economics and data science group and the
behavioral economics and data science group
have a lab on campus, an economics lab. It's not quite as impressive as a
chemistry lab with chemicals bubbling everywhere and explosions going off all
over the place but it is an economics lab - essentially
a controlled environment where people who work on behavioural economics - and I
know this is popular from reading personal statements
over the years -behavioural economics where researchers who work in the field
of behavioural economics can actually introduce games and they
can study how people respond to incentives,
how people respond, how people make decisions, which as I said a few slides
ago, is really what economics is all about.
So there are exciting opportunities for students to get
involved with our research first hand,
so that's important to us as a department. We engage students with what
we're doing and students and we bring this into our
teaching and this is continued even through the
recent pandemic that we've been going through, and obviously working
off-campus we've been organising Zoom seminars for students to
give them some topical talks about how economics can be applied to the current
crisis. So for example on the 14th May
Professor Goenka gave a talk to students on Covid-19 and
the modeling of epidemics, how we do this in
economics and how we can apply economics to
the current crisis and then on the 28th May Dr McDonald
gave a talk about public preferences for equity and
efficiency when saving lives - essentially this is about how to
allocate scarce healthcare resources during the time of a pandemic that we have
recently had to confront. If you'd like to know more about how we
engage with students through our research please do have a
look at our economics Twitter page you can see the handle there, it's
@econ_ub - you can browse, you can follow us,
whatever you prefer to do through the Twitter page. We also have
a Youtube channel that's been set up in just the last week, the name for that is
Econ UBham, that's the name at the bottom of,
the label at the bottom of the slide there,
and actually you can watch some of these Zoom talks, I think Dr McDonald's talk
is there, we will be uploading more as time
goes on to the Youtube channel so if you'd like
to have a look at how we engage with our students, how we
communicate our research to our students, please do look at either of these
channels. We also have a Facebook page as well but
you can find a link to that from our Twitter page. So let me talk a
little bit about how the degree programme is
structured and this will be common across
all universities when you're looking around at different
programmes. We deliver our content through modules,
some of these modules are core and some of them are optional.
So some are compulsory, some are optional, again if you want to know exactly which
modules are offered and exactly which modules are compulsory, are optional for
each programme I would encourage you to visit the
webpage for the particular programme that you are interested in,
but generally speaking the modules can be categorised as
theoretical econometrics, this is the mathematics and statistics of economics
which will be a new term for you I imagine, even if you are
studying A Level economics. So that's something that we will explain of
course as we go through the programme, applied economics, financial economics
and behavioural and experimental economics, I've talked about that already.
We assess students through a variety of continuous assessments, so that could
be essays, group presentations, projects and so on,
and then a final exam similar to what you will already know from school or
college. We have exam periods in January and May/June
and this is what we call a 'semesterised'
academic calendar, in other words the exams are spread out
throughout the year, either in January or in May/June, which
obviously is better for students than having
one very very busy exam period at the at the very end of the year.
One common question in Open Days is how much mathematics is involved in
economics? Now, I talked about the quantitative
skills that you'll develop through an economics or
related degree programme - mathematics is important for economics
and we will certainly be using mathematics in our programme, that's
important, it's why the degree or partly why the
degree programme is is very valuable to students,
we but we use economics, we use mathematics in economics in
an applied way, we use it to build theories, to test theories, to make
quantitative predictions and we build economic models. So these
economic models typically involve maths. Now, unlike most other Russell
Group universities, actually we don't insist on A Level
mathematics, and there are several reasons for
that. We think that it's a little bit too severe actually, to exclude all students
who haven't studied A Level mathematics. Perhaps you're studying physics but
you decided not to study mathematics at A Level for some reason,
it's not that you're not quantitative, it's just that you decided to take a
different path, you made a different choice at A Level,
so we don't require A Level mathematics, but in the first year if you don't
have A Level mathematics you will study a dedicated module in the
first year that will teach you the essential concepts from A Level maths
that you need to succeed on an economics programme.
So, broadly speaking, this is algebra, statistics and calculus.
Those students who do have A Level maths will study a different module
where you push further on the concepts that you already know.
So we have a lot of experience doing this over the years
and we know from experience that students who don't have A Level maths
are not disadvantaged in any way compared to students who do have A Level maths,
and of course through your optional modules, especially in the second and third year,
you may decide to pick the less quantitative optional modules, so you can
tailor the programme to some extent as well,
but there will be a core element of mathematics that's necessary and
important as you go through the the programme, but
not having A Level maths is no barrier at all. So in terms of student support,
we offer as you'd expect a lot of support for students as they go through
their programme, every student will have a dedicated
personal tutor, so that's a full-time member of academic staff
who will oversee your progress throughout your
programme. All academic staff have weekly office hours where students can just
show up without an appointment and ask any questions they like about their
programme or about their modules. Then we have welfare and wellbeing
support, student mentor systems, academic skills sessions where students
can develop their essay writing or math skills and I will leave the Careers
Network talk for the next presentation because
you'll hear more about that very shortly. Now, obviously, university is not just an
academic experience, there are lots of exciting opportunities
outside of the classroom when not studying - students get involved with
student societies, we have a very active and prominent
economic society within the department that we support as a department,
but in fact this is completely student-run, so all credit really goes to
the students in terms of the success of this
society. You might decide to serve as a student rep on our student staff
committee and there will be support for health and
wellbeing. The university has excellent sporting facilities, so
students like to get involved with competitive sport, you might decide to
learn a language or you may spend some of your
non-academic time, let's say, working on your CV, working with the
Careers Network, essentially career development.
So let me say a little bit about indicative offers,
I'm using A Level really to indicate the entry requirement, if you're
studying a different qualification please visit the webpage for each
programme and we obviously can translate from A Levels to other types of
qualificatio,n but what you see is that for BSc
Economics. The standard offer is AAA to AAB,
it would be AAB if you're studying A Level maths and AAA
otherwise, so we do recognise A Level maths but we don't
insist on it in order to join our programmes. It's the same for Money, Banking
and Finance, Mathematical Economics and Statistics -
the entry requirement for that is AAA but that one requires A Level maths. For
the Economics with Language you need to be studying
an A Level in the language because the language starts off at quite
a high level, and then for joint honours the
standard entry requirement is AAB at A Level,
however it's worth saying that your offer, your Birmingham offer, will be
individual to you - it takes account of your GCSE results. So
for example, we require GCSE mathematics at grade A which
is a 7 in the new grading system, and it will also depend on your
personal statement. If you're taking an EPQ, that reduces
your standard offer by one grade, so actually lots of different factors
feed into your offer. So I would encourage you to go to our
website, have a look at the offer calculator
and feed in your details and then the system can tell you
your most likely offer. Okay, so with that I'll thank you for
listening, I'm going to leave you with a picture of
the campus since we're all missing it these days,
but we hope to be back there as soon as possible and thank you very much
for joining the talk today.