IFREE-Sponsored Summer Scholars Program

The History

For the past few years, student participants in the Vernon L Smith High School Workshop in Experimental Economics, began expressing a desire for more advanced work that might build on what they had learned in the workshops. What emerged was a mentoring program — a learning community. This was called the "Intern Program."

For four years, IFREE sponsored a mentoring program for 6-10 high school and undergraduate students who were top-performing participants in the high school workshop program including honors program undergraduates who have taken an experimental economics class and who meet application criteria. Students assist in conducting lab experiments, test new software under development with supervision, and participate in daily group Socratic style dialogue anchored in assigned readings and related laboratory experiments. Finally, yearly students work on the design of new experiments.

Many of these students have continued into college and graduate programs, at GMU, UVA, MIT, LSE, UA. For the third time in 2010, the summer students resided on campus in Chapman’s residence halls during the six-week program and assisted with activities for the high school workshop students.

What's NEW in 2011? IFREE SUMMER SCHOLARS PROGRAM

Thanks to a generous grant from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, IFREE is now able to fund an extraordinary new summer intern program: IFREE Summer Scholars Program

The Summer Scholars Program will nurture and develop the intellectual life of students eager to learn more about how experimental economics can inform our understanding of exchange in all its forms. Alumni of the high school workshop are eligible to participate, as well as any student who has had at least one course with economic experiments at Chapman University.

This summer Prof. Jan Osborn from the English department at Chapman University will be joining Prof. Bart Wilson in leading the Summer Scholars in a truly unique interdisciplinary program born out of their collaborative freshman class entitled, “Humanomics: Exchange and the Human Condition”. Half of this year’s applicants are students from this course. This summer the students will continue to work as research assistants analyzing data sets from ongoing research programs. One group of the students will design a narrative research experiment to explore the connections between language (meaning), morality, and choice and another will design an original research experiment on health care. Over the past three years, three working papers in economics have come out the summer intern work, all of which are currently under review with the students as co-authors. This year the reading group, or “Book Club” as the students have affectionately called it, will engage in Socratic discussions of four economics, psychology, and humanities’ texts: F.A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit, Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger: A Novel.

This is interdisciplinary scholarship and learning at its best. We are drawing from students majoring in disciplines across the curriculum, from business and economics to English and music. The program is designed to be ongoing collaboration of a community of learners. This summer we plan to offer 6 students fellowships to live on campus in the residence halls and 2 commuting fellowships to local students.

Pictures from the 2011 Summer Scholars Program
Chapman ESI Summer Scholars Program | 2010 Summer Interns Share Experience