Does Econ really involve a lot of math?

jonahrubin
Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:13:32 +0000

Introductory Econometrics can be moderately challenging math-wise or not, depending on the focus of your professor. For example, there’s some calculus involved in deriving certain equations that you’ll be using. For the most part though, somebody did all the hard calculus decades ago so you don’t have to. Kind of like the way Newton did most of the calculus to get you to “Force=Mass * Acceleration”. Better yet, most of econometrics is done on computer software anyway! So if you use “RateMyProfessor” well, look at each professor’s old syllabus, you have a good chance to pick an econometrics professor who won’t require you to do difficult math and instead focus on practical problems.

While generally classes which are less quantitative and hard aren’t as valuable, I don’t think this is the case with Econometrics. What you want to learn is how to look at data with popular software packages, how to interpret outputs, deal with problems(serial correlation, heteroskedasticity, etc). That’s assuming you don’t want to get your PhD anyway(math will start getting really hard at that point).