<p>please comment on the microeconomics and the macroeconomics experience and please differentiate between the two experiences at the u of c. please comment on how effective the professors are at communicating, how hard the work is, the size of the classes, the quantity of personal education, etc. i know the school is famous for econ, but is is particularly good at one or the other? which would you recommend to a new student at the u of c–micro or macro and why? which of the two is the school’s specialty? please be thorough in comments because this might make or break (literally) my decision whether or not to apply ea to the u of c.</p>
<p>p.s. i am really interested in one of these two and not at all interested in the other, and that’s why i’m asking this. however, i’m not revealing my interest cause i don’t want to bias answers.</p>
<p>economics is a whole–you can’t be interested in one and not interested in the other. you’ll eventually have to take both even if you want to minor in economics. i’m not going to uchicago, but i think this is basic for the field of economics.</p>
<p>i know what you’re saying but what i mean is that i’m fascinated by one but not as much by the other, although i still like it and would take a couple courses in it. i plan to major in econ and am trying to decide which school’s econ program is the right fit for me</p>
<p>UChicago does not have a lot of macro offerings at the UG level. For majors, there is only intermediate and a few intermittent topical offerings given by visiting professors. Additionally, there is nothing as far as political-economy goes. That being said, the micro offerings are copious as would be expected for a school of Chicago’s stature. </p>
<p>So in short, if you have an acute interest in globalization then it really is not the best choice.</p>
<p>uchicagoalum is much more savvy about this than I. My impression is that macro as a field is somewhat unfashionable right now. All of the energy I have felt in economics over my adult life has come from the micro side, not macro. (I will add that macro bores me, which probably affects my impressions. Unless you are working for the Fed or the Council of Economic Advisors, or are a bond or currency analyst, I don’t know why anyone would care to know much more than the introductory course basics.) Plus, to some extent the holy grail of macro would be to turn it all into micro: rather than making fuzzy predictions about the net effect of billions of cumulative transactions, to understand the billions of transactions and how they will cumulate. Given advances in computing power, that’s not such an unachievable goal.</p>
<p>Anyway, for business, law, most kinds of policy debates, micro, not macro, is the indispensable analytic tool. I think in another thread the OP said he or she really liked Freakanomics. That’s micro.</p>
<p>thx a lot uchicagoalum and jhs, this makes uchicago a perfect fit for me cause i’m very very very interested in micro and feel the same way about econ as jhs.</p>
<p>Sorry to say, I think they’re both very mathy at the end of the day. You don’t need a whole lot of math to understand the concepts, but you do need a whole lot of math to prove the concepts respectably and actually to do the work.</p>
<p>Seriously, I suspect you will have a lot of problems at Chicago or any other similar university if you really are uncomfortable with math and want to be an econ major. Did you look at the Economics Department concentration requirements unalove linked in another thread? At a minimum, at Chicago you would need a full year of college calculus (going way beyond the AP BC curriculum), plus two additional quarters of math, plus a calculus-based statistics course, plus Econometrics. And that’s only if you are the sort of Econ student who really wants to go to law school. The students who are actually serious about Economics will be taking at least another year’s worth of math, maybe more. (And, reading between the lines, the students who are really, really serious about going to graduate school in Economics will probably be math concentrators.) For example, it’s hard to imagine doing valuable work in microeconomics without a pretty good background in game theory.</p>
<p>i like math–its just that i like certain kinds of math–game theory and statistics–while disliking other kinds of math (precalc and geometry). i’m gonna take calc this year and think i’m gonna like it, so i’m not too worried about econ being too mathy for me cause the way it seems (but i’m not sure) microecon involves the kind of math i like</p>
<p>I’m sorry to say it but you SHOULD be worried about econ being too mathy for you. People don’t drop their econ major because they cannot understand economic concepts, they drop their econ major because they cannot hack the mathematical component.</p>