Postgraduate economics courses (with University of Liverpool)

In this episode of Future You, Professor Ian Burn tells us about the MSc Money and Banking, MSc Economic Policy and Data Analytics and MSc Data Science for Economics at the University of Liverpool

Participants

In order of first appearance:

• Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ
• Professor Ian Burn - Professor of Economics and Chair in Applied Microeconomics, University of Liverpool

Transcript

Emily Slade: Thinking of moving into economics? Or perhaps you're already studying and fancy something a bit more specific. These new courses from the University of Liverpool look at money and banking, data analytics and data science. We'll find out more in this episode of Future You.

Hello and welcome to Future You, the podcast from graduate careers experts, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ. I'm Emily Slade and in this episode I'm joined by Professor Ian Burn from the University of Liverpool and we'll be taking a deeper look at three of their new MSc courses in Economics. You can follow Future You on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can find us on Instagram and TikTok at Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ.ac.uk for more advice. Now let's get into the episode.

Professor Ian Burn: My name is Professor Ian Burn, I'm the postgraduate taught lead at the University of Liverpool for the economics department. So I oversee all of our MSc Economics and sort of all of our specialty programs. So I'm here today to talk to everyone about our brand new specialty programs that we've developed, just really help students explore the cutting edge economics and kind of what does that mean for businesses going into the future?

Emily Slade: Amazing. So are you able to briefly sum up the three new courses that you have to offer for us?

Professor Ian Burn: Sure thing. So we have three new specialty courses, and we've sort of designed them around sort of key parts of economics. So we have our Econometrics sort of specialism where we're really going to teach students data science, we call it our Data Science for Economics, and this is sort of marrying that sort of machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer science style with the rigor and analytical structure that economics and econometrics bring you. So it's learning how to use AI and machine learning for economics. And then we have our Economic Policy and Data Analytics. So this is applied to microeconomics. So thinking about things like health care, labor, industrial organisations, thinking about how does government policy affect the economy, and giving students the tools to analyse this. So thinking about, how do we present data to policymakers? How do we devise evaluation studies to see to the policy work, so we give them both the theory and the econometrics, they need to be able to contribute to political and policymaking conversations. And then finally, we have our Money in Banking. So this is sort of that economic and finance type job, so it really marries again, we're gonna hear this again, and again, through our conversations, this emphasis on technical analytical skills, and bringing that into the financial world. So how do we use omics and data analytics to help sort of companies and, banks, figure out sort of the cutting edges of money and banking? So like, what's going on with cryptocurrencies? What's going on with inflation? With those types of things? So how do we devise forecasting models? How do we analyse different policies as they affect the macro economy?

Emily Slade: Oh, wow. That's really cool. So my next question is why have they been developed? You've talked there about sort of AI that's sort of hot on everyone's lips at the moment. So yeah, why what what sort of kick started these programs?

Professor Ian Burn: So it all came about because we were listening to our students when they were wanting more and more electives, and optional modules, focusing on these sort of highly technical skills and highly specialised aspects, so we have this, we have a traditional MSc Economics, which gives you this very strong foundation in economic theory and econometrics. And our students kept wanting us to push it further. Every student evaluation was kind of say, I liked it, but can we get more? How does this apply to the business world? How does this? What's this going to look like in 10, 15 years? So what we did was we sort of tried to imagine where's the economy going to be five, 10 years from now? And rather than kind of keeping our traditional MSc Economics, we've really tried to think about how do we build programs to get students to those places? So sort of rather than trying to react to kind of the changes within economics, really thinking about, where's the role of Economists going? And how do we prepare our students, not for the jobs of today, but for the jobs of the future. And so we kind of worked backwards from where we thought the economic consulting type jobs were going to go, what civil servants were going to have to be doing, and really kind of built the programs around future proofing a lot of the skill sets for our students and sort of giving them the confidence that they can contribute to a rapidly changing kind of labor market in the next five to 10 years.

Emily Slade: Sure, that's incredible. So what opportunities do these courses offer that.

Professor Ian Burn: So these courses are giving students a...we like to call it a toolkit. So we really focus not on learning any specific theory, but a wide range of skills that they can pull out to answer some sort of question. So we build this toolkit for our students, and we kind of, start very constrained everyone using the exact same tools. And then in the second semester, we let students pick optional modules and specialise across their programs to find what tools do they most identify with? And how do they want to combine the tools that we're offering them into creating their own personal sort of toolkit and experience within the program. So it's things like the opportunity to, not just learn econometric software, but we have opportunities, sort of special boot camps every, every couple of months on things like Tableau on Sequel on the specialty software's that, may not be possible to integrate into a 12 week semester when we have so much to cover. But, if we carve out time and give students an afternoon, two days to attend these boot camps and these workshops, we can get them certificates, to let them sort of grab more and more toolkits. So, some things are, we do a lot of mock interviews and assessment centers, so students can see what the labor market is going to be like. So they really have the opportunity in our programs, to take what they're learning in the classroom, and then practice it in the real world. And then, go off and do things, through our skills, enhancements, weeks, that they can bring back to the classroom, so they can go learn a new skill that we weren't going to cover, but then they can bring it into their dissertations. So we offer them a lot of opportunities to go enhance their skills, through different trainings through different opportunities. And really thinking about, what do they like doing? How do they like to get their hands messy with economics, and figuring out where that's going to take them in the future, giving them I like to phrase as we're giving them the chance to try things in a sandpit had failed, when it's safe to fail to figure out what they like and don't like, so I think learning you that you don't like something and you're not good at something is equally as valuable in the classroom as learning what you love. Because you don't want to go into the workplace and go, I thought I really liked this methodology, or this codec software. But actually, after using it for two weeks, it's doing my head. And so we're trying to give students that space to find what they're good at, and really figure out who they are as economists. So that way, when they go into the workplace, they have these experiences to draw on. So things like, when you're doing a group project, if you get a bad person, you're going to have to learn how to kind of navigate that. And so we give them some tools, and some guidance on how to do that. But they sort of experience working in a group, presenting in front of everyone being given a problem to solve and only having a week to do it, these types of things that they face, we really try and focus on the opportunities being modeled after the workplace, and what they're going to actually be doing not coming from the classroom as primary motivators for the opportunities.

Emily Slade: Yeah, no, that's, that's a really good way to do it. Definitely. So once they've got their toolkits, once they figured out what kind of economist they are, what are the job prospects that they can go into through these courses?

Professor Ian Burn: So the nice thing of being an Economist is that we are a jack of all trades when it comes to quantitative kinds of jobs. So our students kind of do everything that trying to figure out what an Economist does, it really is up to you as a person and what you're good at and where you want to bring it. So I mean, broadly speaking with each of the programs, we tried to think about, what are some archetypes that we see in our alumni. And now this isn't to say that people can't go run off and do something really cool with one of these programs that we haven't even thought of? Because every time I see what are alumni are doing. It's like, how did you discover you had that skill from what we taught you? And it's so cool to see how they've pulled together what we do to bring to the workplace. But we've tried to do is kind of think, what do we see? What do we see a lot of us for data science, we saw a lot of students going into these data analytical roles either as Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Data Officers, so getting their hands really messy with helping companies understand the data they have, and transforming that into actionable intelligence. So when you go looking for data science jobs, you see all these, wide range of titles and a wide range of doing things. So we tried to think about what are the core essences of that data scientist job and how do we prepare our students to go into those interviews, have the confidence to answer questions to know that their knowledge is up to snuff. But importantly, how do they translate the economic framing for someone who's coming at it from a computer science background and engineering background, so we really help them prepare for those types of jobs in the way that we teach that data science program. Economic policy, these are your civil servants. We really thought carefully about what was on the civil service exams for Economists, and especially the fast track, which is the super super prestigious version of the civil service, the fast stream. And so we really thought about how do they go into those interviews? And what do we need to prepare them for? And so this is where, we actually can't lose the theory as much as some of our competitors are and focus only on applications in the real world. Because when you go into the civil service exams, they ask you point blank theory questions, they look through the classes you've taken, and they pull out the theories that you should have learned, and then ask you to apply them. So you have to have this very strong base understanding of micro 101, macro 101, these core economic theories for the civil servants, because they don't know what the government's gonna throw at them in terms of what policies are gonna have to look at, what are they going to have to forecast. So you have to go all the way back down to basics, but civil service exam, and kind of be prepared to take, whatever theory, you have it in the background, and then think of all of the political and economic ramifications of that. And so we really thought about what's an example kind of look like, what types of roles in the civil service are our students doing? We couldn't be as specific as we wanted, because we have students going into the Department for International Trade, Department for Development, the Foreign Office, the DEFRA, rail and road I mean, it's pretty much at this point, we have someone in almost every department. And so it's been cool to see how kind of the core trainings then get to kind of put people where their own little passions are, and kind of the policies that they want to be working on. And then for money and banking, we thought about, what is the job? What's the City of London going to look like, 10 years from now? What's the finance positions going to look like? And how do we think about that, in a global context, and thinking about, a lot of our students are coming internationally. So how do we prepare them for dealing for finance and the future of money? Going back to, Asia, going back to Africa, going back to North America? What are they going to bring with them? And how are they going to bring those skills to these banks and these multinational corporations, so it was sort of, thinking through each of these kind of archetypes, then preparing students, not losing that individuality that we had at the MSc Economics that allowed students to score specialise in whatever they wanted. So giving students these archetypes, but letting them express that in a lot of different ways that are unique to each of their own passions.

Emily Slade: Yeah, amazing. So who would they suit you've talked a lot of where you could end up, what types of interests you might have? Who are these courses for?

Professor Ian Burn: So we've designed them for anyone who wants to work with data, and is coming from a broad background, as long as you're comfortable with the basics of data and the basic math coming into this and learning how to use those skills as an Economist. So it's a broad range of social sciences, business engineering, computer science backgrounds, that we're bringing it together. So only about 25 to 30% of our cohort now is economic undergraduates, a lot more of it are people that want to come into economics, people who were maybe economics adjacent in a, in their undergraduate degree or have been so in the working world, and want to kind of shift over and specialise. So it's really giving people that opportunity to come into economics, or if you're an economist to specialise even further, but we kind of start everyone on day one with an understanding that you understand some math, basic calculus, basic statistics. But, we don't assume anyone knows how to code. We don't assume anyone knows a lot about databases, and, data structures and stuff like that. So we really kind of build everyone up from a standstill, to get them ready in 12 months to go to the workplace. So, a little bit, you can imagine it's kind of, we think of it as a marathon, it's 12 months of learning. So people that are really good, this then may be a little bit of a review for them. But people who are brand new, it's still a challenge. And then everyone catches up at their own speed throughout the year until we're at the end where everyone's pretty much ready to go and ready to face the world. So if you're not a traditional economics, undergrad, there's, you know, don't fear. That's why we have these specialty programs - to bring you into this world, and to show you how to use these tools and how to become an Economist.

Emily Slade: What's the most exciting thing about this Masters program for you? What are you so excited about? What can you not wait to tell everyone about?

Professor Ian Burn: So for me, it's always the data, the coding, and it's been so much fun to think about new ways of teaching coding new applications to the coding, and importantly, how do we make it exciting? So one of the things we're working with, is a bunch of partners in the industry to give us a bunch of data that they have, and a question. So, rather than doing a whole consultancy challenge, we want to do a data hack. And so this is kind of something we're working with to bring the classroom into the workplace, not only to show employers, what can our students do, and the skills that they actually have? But to show students - What does it look like to work with a company to answer an economic question using data, a lot of times when we give them data, or we do a problem set together, everything's kind of nice, because where it's gonna go, what the end result is going to be. And you kind of structure it nicely, so that you can do it the amount of time you have. But the real world doesn't work like that, when you get data the first time, it's a mess, there's problems with it, you have to clean it, you have to figure out what's going on with it, no one sits there, the way the lecturer does, and gives you a nice paragraph summary of everything, you have to do that, you have to create that summary. So this is something we've been really excited to work on this year, is to figure out, how do we bring that messiness of the real world into the classroom in a way that is conducive to learning. But also, it's fun, so the data hack, and kind of that, one day event where people come in teams have never seen the data before get it at like 10 in the morning, and they have until 4pm to like produce a bunch of things that the company wants, is actually really cool for us, it's gonna be it's a bit like Taskmaster for nerds, it's just kind of, I think that's what I've been so excited to figure out. Because it's that fun challenge of figuring out what do employers want to see? How do we ensure our students have those skills? But importantly, how can they show that off to employers in a measurable way, that isn't just cheap talk that when they say, I can do this, they have something to prove that they can do that. And that's just kind of fun.

Emily Slade: Amazing. So more on the sort of practical side? Is there any sort of funding available for people interested in these programs?

Professor Ian Burn: Yes, so we have a lot of different funding sources, both at the school management level and at the university level. So, it really depends on where you're coming from your background. So we have special scholarships for those who studied with us at undergrad to continue on. We have 50% scholarships for super promising students who come in with excellent grades and who we think are going to be amazing ambassadors going forward for our programs. So we have about three to four scholarships in each of these programs, depending on how many students we end up having. So this year, we have about eight scholarship students across all four programs. So it's about it always ends up the max, you can get 50% off, but you know, at that price point, I think, you're getting very good bang for your buck, as we say. But yeah, there's tons of funding available. So I really encourage people where funding is an issue to get in contact with us, and we can kind of walk you through a lot of the options that might be available for you. Because it's a little bit individual specific.

Emily Slade: Amazing. And if people do want to find out more, or if they want to start applying, where should they go?

Professor Ian Burn: They should go to the University's website for the postgraduate programs, so they can check us out at the University of Liverpool Management Schools website. We have a lot more details on our own economics group page, they can check out our socials, the University of Liverpool Management School on LinkedIn, Twitter, and you can see all the cool things that we're doing and get announcements for things like open weeks if they want to come talk to us, or for cool events that our students are going to just to kind of see what it's like and what's going on at Liverpool throughout the year.

Emily Slade: Amazing, we'll make sure to put all those links in the bio. Thank you so much for your time today.

Professor Ian Burn: Thanks, thank you for having me.

Emily Slade: Thank you once again to Ian for his time today, you can head to the university's website to find out more about the courses and also to apply. You can search for other postgraduate courses by going to prospects.ac.uk. If you've enjoyed today's episode and want to get in touch or if you've got any feedback, you can email podcast@prospects.ac.uk Make sure to give us a follow on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and you can also find us on Instagram and TikTok. All the links will be in the description. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Note on transcripts

This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.

Find out more

• Learn more about the MSc Economics.
• Explore the University of Liverpool Management School.
• Get an introduction to postgraduate economics courses.