- [Ashley] Welcome.
We're glad that all of you
can join us this afternoon
for your virtual visit to Carthage.
We wish that we were able to welcome you
to campus in person,
but until we're able to do so,
we're glad you're taking
advantage of this virtual event.
We have numerous other virtual events
available on our website.
We encourage you to check
out the upcoming events
and also the recordings
of the previous webinars
that we have hosted.
My name's Ashley Hanson.
I'm the associate vice president
for admissions and financial aid.
Today we have some of our
expert faculty members
from the Political Science,
International Political Economy,
and the Economics Departments at Carthage.
They are gonna share with
you additional information
about what their programs offer.
How they work with our students,
what our students are doing
both in and outside of the classroom,
and life after Carthage.
As you have questions,
you are welcome to use the chat feature,
which is at the bottom of the screen.
At the end of the faculty presentations
we will be able to have the
question and answer session.
This presentation is being recorded
and will be placed on our
website after today's event.
So, you're welcome to reference back to it
or to share with friends
and family members as well.
We can't wait to have
you on campus in person,
but until then, please enjoy
hearing more from our faculty.
Professor Mast, Professor
Cyr, Professor Cronovich,
we're glad to have you here today.
Welcome.
- So, good afternoon everyone.
And on behalf of a very
large number of people
I'd like to say congratulations
on finishing up high school.
You're only a couple months away from
getting your college career started.
We look forward to
helping you all with that.
I'm gonna start us off.
Here we go.
I'm going to take a little bit of time
and talk about the Political
Science Department at Carthage.
I'm not gonna get into real detail,
but I will give you kind of oversight
of the various kinds of
educational experiences
you'll have in the classroom
and kind of just introduce
you to some of the questions
that are typical of what
you would be grappling with
in our department.
My slides.
There we go.
So, before we get into the classes,
a little bit about what politics is.
Political science is the
systematic study of politics.
There's a lot of different ways
to come at the subject of politics.
It's kind of conventional
to think about politics
in a classical sense,
as well as a modern one.
In the classical realm here
in Western civilization
we trace the systematic study of politics
to the Ancient Greeks.
Fellas like Socrates
depicted there on the screen.
And for the Greeks,
politics was this activity
that was dedicated to the
study of virtue and justice,
trying to figure out what
the good community is,
what a good life is.
These are kinds of moral questions
that still resonate in
the political realm today.
But in a more modern sense
we've come to think about politics
as a kind of struggle for
power and how to use power.
Professor Harold Lasswell
is pictured there.
He very famously described politics
as who gets what, when, and how.
Dr. Lasswell was a long-time
professor at Yale University,
but he has a regional connection.
He was an Illinoisan, born and raised.
He did his PhD at the
University of Chicago.
He's on a very short list
of the most famous American
political scientists.
And then I guess I'd
like to point out that
the systematic study of politics
can be both empirical as well
as normative in character.
And by normative what I mean is
if empirical study of politics
is about trying to figure out
politics as it's practiced
and how it actually
takes place in the world,
a normative perspective
on politics would be
about exploring questions of
politics as they should be.
Asking not just what politics is,
but what ought it to be.
And political science encompasses
both veins of inquiry.
Our department divides the curriculum
up into some subfields.
It's very typical for colleges
and universities to do this.
One subfield is American
government and politics,
and the kinds of questions
you'll be exposed to
in these sorts of classes
include things like the character
of American political
institutions and processes,
their historical roots,
and their evolutionary path over time.
Why are political institutions changing?
What are the constant consequences
of those changes, and so forth.
How has the United States
interacted with other
states in the world and why?
We can get Professor Cyr
perhaps to talk a little bit
about American foreign
policy at one point.
He teaches a course in that.
We also offer a course
in American military conflicts as well.
And then with respect to
policy kinds of questions,
how do public policies emerge?
Why do they emerge?
When and what conditions
do they emerge in,
and what form should they take?
A number of our courses are also separated
into a subfield called public law.
Civil rights and civil liberties
are essential topics within
the field of public law.
With respect to civil
liberties, how free are we?
How free should we be is a
kind of critical question,
and an enduring one
that's changed over time.
Civil rights, how equal
are we before the law?
How equal should we be?
And you don't have to spend much time
looking at news stories in the press
to see that these kinds of questions
are constantly surfacing all the time,
and they are nothing if
not enormously relevant
to contemporary American political life.
And then we also explore
the proper balance of power
between the branches of government.
Again, any kind of cursory examination
of current political issues
will illustrate the tug
and pushing and pulling
between the various branches
over the lines of authority,
the exercise of power, and so forth.
And so, be it at the state level...
Here in Wisconsin, for instance,
very recently the governor
had asserted authority to
institute certain social
distance measures.
The legislature pushed back
and argued that he did not have...
He was exceeding his authority,
and the courts, of course, intervened
in favor of the legislature.
And so, these questions
of separation of power
and checks and balances, again,
like civil liberties and
civil rights, enduring.
Studying the public law
will expose students to
these kinds of arguments
and to the ways in which the courts
have viewed these questions
and the evolution of the
arguments that courts have made
about what the answers,
what they think the answers
to those questions ought to be.
Another realm of coursework in
political science at Carthage
deals with what we might
call global politics,
and so international relations
and comparative politics.
Another important realm of the discipline,
and our students are
very fruitfully engaged in those subjects.
So, questions like how
states, or countries...
In political science we refer to countries
as states very often.
How do they behave on the
international stage, and why?
How and why do different types of states
produce different kinds of outcomes?
And how do states and their
politics vary by region?
Many of our students have
an international focus.
They're very interested in the world,
and they're pulled into
the study of politics
in the Middle East, or in Latin America,
or in Asia, for instance,
and these are the sorts of
classes that can supplement
or drive further those kinds of interests.
And then when it comes
to political theory,
political theory is a field
that stretches all the way
back to the Greeks, at least,
in the Western tradition, at least.
And they're gonna be dealing with
certain kinds of questions,
like what is the nature of citizenship?
What does citizenship require of us?
What is justice?
What is the best form of government?
And so, the courses at
Carthage in this realm
are designed to give students an exposure
to kind of the arc of thinking
as it's evolved over time.
In the slide here we have
a bridge on the left.
The image in the upper right is,
of course, Niccolò Machiavelli,
who is in his own way a kind of bridge
between classical and modern thinking.
And students become conversant
in the various ideas of
Western political thought.
Then I guess in addition to all of that,
what is the essence of human nature?
And how do different answers
to the question of what human nature is,
how does that shape one's perspective
on all those other kinds of questions?
Then to just wrap things up
I thought I'd throw out
a couple suggestions
as to why one might
study political science.
You might be interested in public problems
and how those public
problems might be solved.
There's a whole range of
public problems out there
as I'm sure you are aware,
ranging from climate change,
to air and water pollution,
to crime, racism.
My colleagues will talk perhaps
a bit about economic problems, poverty,
inequality, the distribution
of opportunity, and so forth.
All of these kinds of
challenges that societies face
are public problems to the extent that
we are all vulnerable to
the actions of others.
And dealing with public problems
requires collective action.
That is some kind of coordinated effort
by individuals to deal with.
And if you're interested
in collective action,
collective action requires politics.
It occurs at all scales
of human existence:
local, state, national, and global.
Again, there are opportunities
for people to engage in
all these different scales.
You can engage these, the
effort at collective action,
both in the public sector as
well as the private sector.
Public service encompassing civil service,
working within executive branches,
but also in elected office.
And then the private sector.
Perhaps you've heard of the acronym NGOs.
That stands for
non-governmental organizations.
There are a plethora of NGOs out there
engaged in the business of trying to
promote political objectives
and to achieve political objectives
in the private nonprofit sector.
And then it could be that
you're interested in the law
and a career in the legal
field as an attorney,
as a criminal defense
lawyer or a prosecutor,
prosecuting attorney,
or practice in family law
perhaps, or business law.
Political science students
coming out of Carthage
have entered all of those
fields over the years.
Political science is a
good way to expose yourself
and prepare yourself for
those kinds of careers.
And then finally and of
a more general sense,
studying political science,
like studying a number of fields here...
I'll throw a bone
to all of my colleagues
throughout the college
studying political science.
If you do it well,
like if you study history
well, or sociology well,
or chemistry well, or economics well,
or international political economy well,
it will help you think more
clearly, more critically,
and improve your communication skills at
letting people know important information
in the interests of
generating collective action.
So, that's my spiel
on the studying of political
science at Carthage.
I will turn it over,
and I'll look forward to
questions that you might have
on more specific kinds of topics
when that time in the program comes.
So, thanks for listening.
- Okay, I think it's my turn.
Hi, everybody.
I'm Ron Cronovich,
economics professor.
So, I'm so happy that you could make it.
Like Ashley said,
I'm really sorry that we're
not doing this in person,
but I look forward to
welcoming you to campus soon.
So, I'm the economics professor.
Economics, political science,
and international political economy
really go nicely together.
There's a lot of overlap.
We study a lot of the same issues
but from different perspectives,
and the fields really
complement each other well.
And I'm super lucky to
be able to work with
the two people.
I don't know where the little
boxes are on your screen.
But Professor Mast and Professor Cyr
are just so fantastic,
and I've learned so much from each of them
and from my other colleagues
by working with them over
the past number of years.
So, I also have some PowerPoint slides.
I'm gonna see if I can share my screen.
Just give me a minute to do that.
- [Professor Mast] There you go.
- All right, fantastic.
So, let me talk a little bit
about the kinds of things that
economics majors learn about.
Almost everything that
happens in the world
has something to do with the economy.
So, lots and lots of
things that you read about
in the headlines, shocks to the economy,
like the effects of global pandemic.
In my macro class this past spring
we spent a lot of time learning
about the economic impact
of the coronavirus on
industries, on the job market,
on government policy,
the government budget,
and things like that,
so that really made for some
very lively conversations.
So, government has a
number of tools available
to impact economic outcomes.
Tools like taxation, both
at the aggregate level,
how much taxes the government takes out,
and maybe using tax cuts to
possibly stimulate the economy,
government spending programs.
At the micro level, the
way the government taxes
different kinds of activities
or goods to alter incentives
and to encourage
businesses to put resources
into one area or another,
things like that.
Labor markets, things that
impact wages and jobs.
We have a really cool
course on labor economics,
and I teach a pretty neat course
on the economics of income inequality,
why it is that some people
earn a lot more money than others.
It turns out that the
degree of impact inequality
has a huge effect on so
many different outcomes,
things that you might not expect
would be related to income inequality.
That, for example, the
prevalence of mental illness,
obesity, teen pregnancy, incarceration,
environmental issues, and many, many more
are all related to the
degree of income inequality.
And this is a big deal
because income inequality has
gotten really, really high
in the United States and
some other countries.
So, this is a really topical area,
and people in all different majors
like to learn about this stuff,
so I am blessed with
lots of different kinds
of students in this class.
So, those are just a couple of examples.
Down at the bottom of my slide
I list just a few of the other areas
that econ majors learn about.
After a set of core courses,
students are welcome to
branch off into any sort of
specialties that they're
interested in learning about.
We really have a lot of options,
and the various economics professors
have a wide range of expertise.
So, almost anything
that you're interested in learning about,
you can find one or two of three of us
that can give you a lot of support.
So, we offer a number
of different classes.
We offer a lot of different
kinds of experiential learning.
One big highlight of our program
is meaningful one-on-one
research with a professor.
So, this happens in the senior year
when students write their senior thesis.
This is a big deal research project
that's sort of a capstone experience.
Draws on lots of different
things students have learned.
And students usually pick a topic
that they're really interested in,
something that they've maybe learned about
in one of their other courses
and they want to spend more
time doing original research.
So, they'll work with one or
two of the faculty members
individually on the project.
And students really produce
pretty amazing stuff in these projects.
Carthage also offers funding for students
to do summer research projects.
So, the students get paid to
work on a research project
with a professor, and so
that becomes their job.
So, instead of working at, you know,
working at a regular job,
you could work on your research
and make money doing that
and have a really good experience.
Students that do those
programs really produce
some pretty incredible research at the end
that helps them in the job market
or becomes a work product
that they can use,
a sample of their work that they can use
when applying to graduate
programs and things like that.
We take our students
to a number of different exciting places
in the Milwaukee to Chicago corridor.
The Chicago Federal Reserve,
the Chicago Board of Options Exchange,
and other institutions in Chicago
have had Carthage students,
econ majors and other majors.
Professor Mast and I
took some of our students
a couple of years ago
to an energy-related think tank
at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Talked to an expert there.
We were teaching a course
on energy type issues,
political science, and economics,
and environmental stuff,
and that's a really fun course.
The Fed Challenge.
So, the Federal Reserve System,
which sets monetary policy,
oversees the banking system,
manipulates interest
rates in the short-term
to try to help the economy grow smoothly.
The Federal Reserve has a
program called the Fed Challenge
for high school students
and college students.
Teams of students work on a presentation
to actual senior economists
at the Federal Reserve,
in which they put
themselves in the position
of the top people running
the Federal Reserve,
and they argue for economic policy,
and they back up their arguments
with all kinds of data
and their own analysis.
And it's really a pretty great experience.
It's a way to apply what
you're learning in economics
to the real world.
So, that's been a fantastic
experience for our students.
We do lots of interdisciplinary courses.
We take our students on trips.
In our J-Term program we've offered
some pretty fun trips to different places.
There was a J-Term trip a
couple of years ago on Brexit.
So, students went to London
with a couple of our professors
and learned about Brexit from the people
that were sort of making it happen.
There have been other pretty neat trips
to different parts of the
world or parts of the country
on different things related
to economics and society.
So, there are a lot of different...
These are just a few,
but I can't leave off small classes.
So, the neat thing about Carthage,
this is not just for
economics but for all majors,
after you get out of
the intro level classes,
the classes are pretty much all small,
and the professors get to
know every single student
by face and by name.
And that's really great for us
because we can support
your learning a lot better
when we have eight, or 10, or 15 of you
than if we would have 40, or 60, or 80,
like at some big universities.
So, that's really important.
That contributes a lot to
the Carthage experience.
Here are a few things
that our recent graduates are doing.
They're going to graduate schools,
a lot of really excellent graduate schools
around the country and in the region.
We've got a couple of students
who are working at the
Federal Reserve System.
One is an intern; another
one is employed there,
Chicago and also Washington D.C.
Council of Economic Advisors
to the president of the United States.
So, at least two of our
students have worked
or are working in the
Council of Economic Advisors
for the last few administrations,
going back, I think, to George W. Bush.
Before that is before I came to Carthage,
so I'm not sure about that.
And then different kinds of
organizations, companies,
government agencies, and not-for-profits.
So, you might have noticed a pattern
in the different things here
that Carthage econ majors are doing,
and the pattern is that
there's no pattern. (chuckles)
And that's because a
Carthage economics degree
doesn't box you in to a
very narrow career path.
It gives you tools that you can use
throughout a range of
different career paths.
Of course, that's true for other fields
like political science,
and history, and art,
and music, and English
literature, and things like that.
You really should major in
the thing that you love,
even if it's not economics,
but hopefully it'll be
economics or political science
because no matter what you major in,
you're gonna learn how to think,
how to write well, how
to work well with others,
how to communicate
clearly in different ways,
speaking, and writing, and so forth.
All of these skills are highly in demand
and highly rewarded by the job market,
and you'll get them no matter
what you study at Carthage,
but study econ, or political science,
or international political economy.
Okay, so, a lot of our
students go on to law school,
not a majority,
but economics really is good
preparation for law school,
and that's because the kinds of things
that you learn in economics
really develop your analytical abilities,
and these are the very abilities
that are tested on the LSAT.
So, the LSAT is the entry
exam for law school.
This is one of several
studies that I have seen
on LSAT scores by undergraduate major.
Econ is always near the top,
like in the top 20% of the majors.
So, this one is from 2018.
The scores range from 149.5 at the bottom
to 162.8 at the top,
and econ is pretty close
to the top at number six
out of 45 different
majors that were ranked.
So, I don't know if this
is bordering on crass
or if it's just practical.
I have some different data on salaries
by field of undergraduate major.
Now, really not by field of career
because what you major in
really is not super highly correlated
with what you'll end up doing.
I mean, I showed you on the earlier slide
how econ majors are doing all
different kinds of things.
But econ majors tend to do well.
So, I couldn't figure out
how to switch over to the internet,
so I just did a screen grab
and pasted it into my PowerPoint.
Econ is near the top of salaries,
behind the engineering fields, of course,
and up here with physics
and computer science.
There's really a range.
And most of these fields
are doing pretty well.
I mean, almost anything that you major in,
you're gonna be okay.
Somebody with a bachelor's
degree earns, on average,
one and a half million dollars more
over the course of their lifetime
than somebody without a bachelor's degree.
But economics...
If this is something that
you wanna know about,
maybe you care about this,
econ is one of the higher ranking fields
in terms of salary.
All right.
So, that's it.
I'm gonna turn it over to Professor Cyr,
director of the International
Political Economy program,
a really excellent program
at Carthage College,
and then I'm gonna hang around,
and we'll all be available
in case you have questions at the end.
Professor Cyr.
- Thank you, Ron.
I wanna echo Professor Mast
and Professor Cronovich
by underscoring how much we appreciate
you considering Carthage college
among the many different choices
that you and your parents have,
and we wanna thank you for
taking time to be with us.
It's a challenging time in some ways,
but also an important
fact to keep in mind is,
thanks to technology
we have literally
communications everywhere.
Once upon a time you
had to have a telephone
that you didn't carry in your pocket
but that sat on a mantelpiece at home
and was rather large and
connected with a wire to the wall,
or you had to have a television set
that was a very big piece of furniture
with a very small screen.
An older person like me can
remember those ancient times.
Also connected by
various wires to the wall
and an antenna on the roof.
What I thought I'd do...
You're listening to very
intelligent professors
who like to talk and are good at it
providing a huge amount of information.
College is challenging, and
it's already challenging
for those of you who are trying to absorb
all these different points of view
from all these talkative men and women
that have the opportunity to talk to you.
What I thought I'd do
is not present slides,
but just talk a bit informally.
What is international political economy?
I've had people who
were quite knowledgeable
in other parts of the academic world
ask exactly the same question.
The short, straight answer is
it's where political
science and economics began.
I mentioned technology.
Something called the
Industrial Revolution,
which began at the end
of the 1600s in Britain,
where an awful lot of technology
and a lot of inventions
are made, even today.
The British lead the
world in important ways
in inventing things of all kinds,
including important ideas.
At the end of the 1600s,
something called the
steam engine was invented,
which evolved into a
steam-powered locomotive
that I'm sure you may have seen,
probably standing still,
but certainly seen photographs, pictures,
old film and video of
these big, noisy machines
moving huge amounts of
goods and a lot of people
around the landscape.
Nowadays they tend to
be much quieter, diesel,
or more and more electrically driven.
The steam engine created all
kinds of new economic activity,
and our British friends decided
we really need to study this in detail.
It's affecting our politics.
Just before they invented
the steam engine,
the British went through
a bloody civil war,
I mean really bloody, back in the 1600s,
when it was a very different
country than today.
1776, that probably rings a bell.
The American Revolution began,
sparked by ideas that are from Britain
and by lots of technology
that helped the Americans
feel much more independent
from their home British Isles,
and lots of ideas.
In 1776 the American Revolution began.
1776 as well, a very
famous political economist,
you've heard a lot of names this afternoon
but one more is Adam Smith
who really in a brilliant,
and insightful, and very clear way
described what was happening
in the Industrial Revolution.
Early in the 20th century
the Americans decided, in
the economics profession,
"We are so smart.
"We're so disciplined.
"We know how to not
only analyze technology
"but use statistics in a way
"that means we're really
a distinctive profession.
"We will separate ourselves
"and become a different occupation,"
which is certainly justifiable
and understandable.
Our British friends...
And I'll stop the history lesson soon.
Our British friends have
always kept the two together.
At the end of the 1960s
and into the 1970s,
our country had a lot of problems.
We had very high unemployment
and high inflation
going on at the same time,
and a lot of economists,
especially in the academic world,
had predicted that that would not happen.
It's always dangerous to predict
what human beings are actually gonna do.
We also had a very frustrating
and very, very costly war
going on in Southeast Asia,
the Vietnam War, which
seemed to have no end.
And a lot of people from academia
with 20/20 hindsight had
been involved in that.
So, there was a movement in this country
to get economics and political
science back together again.
And I've been fortunate to
learn a lot about economics.
I'm in the political science department
and learn a lot about
not just the history I've been describing
but how things are
unfolding in the future,
because this interdisciplinary major
looks at the dynamics, the relationships,
the changes between these two fields,
and because we live in a complicated world
but also because the Americans
have a tremendous capacity
to innovate and change
in every aspect of life,
mostly for the better.
You've probably seen this
freedom and equality,
the best of our country,
even in your young lives.
I've been very privileged
to learn about how
these two dimensions
relate to one another.
Political economy is not a department
like economics and political science.
It's a program.
I tend to be an old relic in
my outlook from the Cold War,
which ended before you guys were born,
or just about that time.
I have therefore been privileged
not only to be around younger people
and to teach on a full-time basis
but also to learn more
about how politics and
economics come together.
That's the way the world is changing.
To echo what Professor Cronovich,
and also Professor Mast said,
but Ron Cronovich with perfect timing.
His concluding remarks were very much
what I wanted to emphasize
in my story to you.
Study what you're most interested in.
What you're really interested in
is what will carry you the farthest,
eventually make the most
money, believe it or not,
and will lead to the most satisfying life.
So, we're here to tell
you about our departments
and the program that I'm involved in,
but we're not here to sell you a car
or really sell you a discipline.
We're here to sell Carthage College
and to urge you to consider
what is most interesting to you.
Most of you probably don't
know that at this point,
but that's why college is here.
It's challenging and it's difficult,
but it's also very supportive.
One other important point
since making a living is important
and a lot of people
nowadays focus on business,
which I think is all to the good.
Institutions in this country especially,
also in Britain, not so much
in some other countries,
but people who actually
run big corporations,
big nonprofits, educational institutions,
government agencies and offices,
they tend to a remarkable degree
to be liberal arts graduates.
We have a Clausen Center
that's named for Tom Clausen,
a graduate from a long time ago,
even from my point of view,
who ran Bank of America,
the giant commercial bank,
and something called the World Bank,
one of three big economic
arms of the United Nations.
He majored in mathematics at Carthage,
but he also majored in philosophy.
He was convinced at a young age,
and he happened to be right,
not for the first or last time,
that a liberal arts background
was the best kind of preparation
for a career in banking
that he wanted to go into,
or most other kinds of work.
That's one point to keep in mind.
Our students and graduates,
a number of them have done very well.
Ron mentioned the Council
of Economic Advisors
and the Federal Reserve Board.
Jackson Bailey, who
majored in finance and IPE,
graduated just a year ago,
is now working for the
Council of Economic Advisors
in Washington, a pivotal agency,
and right at the center of economic policy
made by our federal government at the top.
John Gray, who graduated
more like a decade ago
and also chose to go into public service,
is currently associate director
of the Office of Management and Budget,
OMB, which you may not have heard of,
and a lot of adults haven't either.
But the Office of Management and Budget,
previously the Budget Bureau,
they actually define
what the president and
his immediate staff,
or his or her immediate staff
I'm sure will be true soon,
and others, the federal
budget, and then they run it.
It's one of the most powerful bodies
in the federal government
and one of the least visible.
Jen Fournier, who graduated
again a little while ago,
is now a rising executive at Uline,
the huge packaging and shipping company
not too far away from campus
and not too far from the big
Amazon distribution center.
IPE majors go into business,
go into government and
the nonprofit world,
and increasingly for people your age,
in contrast to people my age and older,
Americans especially move
around among nonprofit,
government, and business entities.
So, these are ideas that I
hope you'll keep in mind.
We're not here to sell you anything
except the value of our fine college
and the importance of a college education.
I hope you'll get in touch with me.
I'm not showing you a lot of slides,
but one email I'd like you
to remember is A-C-Y-R,
alpha, charlie, yankee, romeo
in the phonetic alphabet,
acyr@carthage.edu.
Since I had my first job interview
when I was even younger than you guys
because my father insisted on it,
I thought of the great
question I should have asked
as I was walking down
Western Avenue in Los Angeles
after the interview,
and it hasn't changed
a bit, even at my age.
After the important meeting
or job interview or whatever,
I still think of what I should
have said after the meeting.
So, I am sure there are
things I should have asked.
I hope I've prompted some questions
among you fine young people,
and I hope beyond the discussion today
you'll feel free to send me an email.
Thank you for being with us.
- [Ashley] Thank you for all
that wonderful information.
For those of you who are watching
you are welcome to use the chat feature
at the bottom of your screen,
and there's also the Q&A section as well.
But to get us started,
now, for a student who may be undecided,
how would you advise them
if they have an interest
in the three areas that
you've talked about today
to help them figure out
what they want to do?
- Well, take a class,
an introductory class in the field.
I'll let my two eloquent
colleagues carry on from there.
But what's interesting to you.
- Don't be afraid to sign up for a class
for any other reason than,
oh, it just seems interesting.
You can jump into a degree
in IPE, or economics,
or political science.
You don't have to figure
that out your first year.
You can spend a year
marinating in a variety of
different kinds of classes
and then gravitate towards
one of our three fields
and still have plenty of time
to graduate in four years.
So, you know, take classes.
Experiment in that regard.
- So, I would like to add also.
So, that's the first best advice.
The second best advice
is to just pop in to a professor's office.
You know, we all have our doors open.
We love it when students come by.
You know, when you visit me in my office,
you're actually saving me money
because if you weren't,
I'd probably be buying a
bunch of stuff on Amazon
that I don't really need. (chuckles)
So, please come visit me,
and I'd love to talk to you
about econ or related subjects,
and most of my colleagues
feel exactly the same.
Our doors are open.
You can just pop in.
You can chat with us about our field
or other fields or your interests,
and that's a good thing to do too
while you're exploring different options.
I can tell you that I switched majors
like five times as a
college student, (chuckles)
and I was super happy when
I settled on economics.
But there are a lot of others ones that
if I had unlimited time,
I would probably major
in 10 different things
because there are so many
interesting things out there.
So, it is tough to narrow it down,
and you do have to narrow
it down to one or two.
But as long as you're happy,
that really is the main thing
because everything else
will come from that.
- Talk to professors, no question.
We're in this field because
we like to talk to students.
Professor Cyr is encouraging
you all to send him an email.
That's an invitation
that Ron and I also
would be happy to extend.
- [Ashley] Thank you.
So, during the past eight
to 10 weeks, how have you
or how were you working
remotely with your students?
- Well, I'll go first.
What I didn't do is much of this.
So,
I made a judgment right away
when the college decided
that we were going online
that students would have a lot of
video interaction with faculty,
and so I chose to not do that.
I don't regret that choice,
although I think that
should this opportunity arise,
I will incorporate some
video interaction like this
moving forward.
But what I did do is
interact with my students
via our course websites, a lot of chats,
a lot of written commentary
on their written work.
And so, I gave a lot of feedback
on the writing that I
expected my students to do
in response to the various
reading assignments
or video assignments that I gave them.
- So, I...
I didn't hold a class session
where everybody would Zoom in
at the same time at a regular time
because I knew quite a few of my students,
their lives were changed.
Like, some of them had to take jobs.
Some of them had just
different kinds of commitments
or different kinds of challenges,
some of which I couldn't imagine
and I certainly couldn't observe.
So, I just felt it would be tough
for a number of the students
to meet with the whole class
for a big Zoom in, a big
Zoom fest at the same time.
So, what I did was
I made short lectures on
video of very focused topics,
like five-minute lectures
on different topics.
I created multimedia
lessons that had videos,
links to resources at the
Bureau of Labor Statistics
when unemployment started shooting up
about a month or so ago.
Students could monitor that in real time
and plug that data into the
economic models we were learning
to see what that would mean
for gross domestic product,
and consumer spending,
and all these other things
that they were learning
about in their textbook.
Discussion boards.
So, our learning management system
has a discussion board feature
where students or the professor
can enter discussion items,
and students can interact that way.
While I didn't have a Zoom class,
I did tons of video,
one-on-one video calls.
So, one of my students
who was so great during
the regular semester
was really struggling
when we went to online,
and we talked about it, and
she said it was because she,
with the class on campus,
that imposed some structure in her life.
Like, she had to be in
this classroom at this time
and that classroom at that time.
And without the structure,
plus with the craziness of her house,
you know, all of her
brothers and her sisters
and her parents were there,
and it was just hard to find quiet places,
so she was having trouble
carving out chunks of time.
So, what we've tried to do,
and this ended up working pretty well,
was she and I would just
have a standing video call
every two to three days,
and we would go over some material.
I would give her some practice problems.
She would work them out.
I could correct her in real time
if she wasn't getting something right,
or if she was, that was great,
and then we could move on to other things.
So, it was just different
because every student was
in a different situation,
so I just had to see
what would work better for these students,
which isn't the same
as what would work well
for these other students.
So, I had to make it up as I went.
Plus, I've never done
online teaching before.
It was all pretty new to all of us.
But hopefully we won't have
to do that in the fall,
but no matter what, we have the summer
to get up to speed on the best
practices in online teaching
just in the event that that has to be
a part of the learning
experience in the fall.
But we're really hoping for
back in person on campus.
- [Ashley] Thank you.
- I tend to have smaller classes,
and a main focus for me
was the senior thesis
in political economy,
which is an intensive,
in-depth, long essay
comparable to what's done in economics
and political science,
and we tend to have,
with some frequency, economics
majors in IPE as well,
and regularly political science majors,
including this last spring.
I decided in my circumstances
it would be good
to stick with our regular
structured schedule,
and we did, but I certainly
learned more about Zoom
and especially Google Meet,
starting from a pretty
low base of expertise
and became pretty good at it.
I also became better at using PowerPoint.
I've been vexed by the fact that
I should be using it more in class.
This public health problem is challenging,
but Americans also love technology.
And the more you folks
travel to other countries...
And you will as undergraduates.
It's an incredibly integrated
world in human terms,
and young people like you
make a vital difference.
You'll see just how high-tech
we are in this country.
So, my guess is
this public health
problem is fading already,
but the Americans especially will continue
to use technology in the
classroom more than before,
including stodgy old professors like me.
- [Ashley] Thank you.
One question that a student
just asked privately is,
what type of internships
can students complete,
and when do they normally do that
over their four years?
- There's no set time.
Internships are, I would say,
usually taken after the
first couple of years.
Junior year is a good time to do it.
In political science a couple students
more recently have done internships
that were parleyed into jobs,
one with Johnson Bank,
a young man who graduated
a couple years ago
and wrote his thesis with me.
He's working for the
Johnson Bank in Racine.
Another with Johnson Controls.
She did an internship last summer
that has parleyed into
a long-term professional
position in human resources.
We've had students in
the public prosecutor's office,
doing internships with the
governor's office up in Madison.
And like I said, no specific
required time to do that,
but usually by your second or third year
keeping an eye out for
opportunities is a good idea.
- So, I would add that Carthage
has a new Aspire Center coming online
that is going to integrate
various kinds of internship experiences
into the Carthage curriculum
and make them available for all students.
So, we've got some top people
that are working on that.
They have connections
with different kinds of private sector,
government, and nonprofit organizations
in between Milwaukee
and Chicago and Madison,
and they're gonna be placing students
into all different kinds of internships
depending on the student's interests,
the field that they're studying,
and what they might
wanna do after Carthage.
So, I think we're gonna
see more and more of that
because it's gonna be a
systematic part of the education--
- The institution has
really made it a priority.
- Yeah, the Aspire Center is important.
It's very well endowed,
and it's been a priority of the college
now for a while.
You can see it steadily growing.
Both Jerry and Ron make
the point in different ways
about how an internship can
get your foot in the door,
and in my time at Carthage,
I've now been around for a while,
I've seen it just
naturally growing steadily.
We have some very successful
student service organizations
connected with our Clausen Center.
Mock Trial,
which is very helpful for anyone,
not just those who are
interested in law school,
in terms of effective public presentation
in a highly competitive environment.
Model United Nations,
which has been shepherded by Jeff Roberg,
a good colleague of ours
in political science,
very successfully.
Enactus is a student service organization,
where I've been more directly involved
for now a fairly long period of time.
Jaclyn Wilks is the latest
and a successful president
of that very successful student-led group.
She had an internship at SC Johnson,
the home care products that
you've probably all heard of
or seen at some level, even if
you haven't thought about it.
One of the biggest privately
owned companies in the world
right next door in Racine.
She had a very good internship
that turned into a very
attractive full-time job
that she's moving on to
after her graduation over the weekend.
And as our comments, I hope, reveal,
we're very much integrated
in this process.
It's one of the strengths
of a small college
as opposed to the very
different environment
of a large, much more
structured university.
- [Ashley] Wonderful.
(audio distorting)
There's a lot of important
information that you have shared,
and these areas are just so important
as we look at the world
around us right now,
and so relevant.
What would each of you say...
What makes your program
and your department unique
in comparison to other
institutions of higher learning?
(Professor Cyr chuckling)
- Well, I'm gonna speculate
a little bit because
I've been involved in a
handful of universities,
but only a handful. (chuckles)
One thing that I really am proud of
with respect to the political
science department at Carthage
is the enormous effort that
the faculty in the department
make towards the senior thesis experience.
Both Art and Ron have
mentioned it in their comments.
I haven't.
So, this isn't unique to the
political science department.
My colleagues also could and
did rightly brag about it.
But the senior thesis,
all of our students are
required to write one.
These are papers that range
from 25 to 45 pages in length.
They incorporate two, three
dozen scholarly sources
into the context of the
arguments that they make.
All students spend two semesters
dedicated to working it out,
a junior spring semester
course getting them ready,
and then the fall semester
of their senior year they write it.
There's nothing comparable to it
with respect to the depth of attention
that students are required
to dedicate to it,
and invariably, at the end,
the students and us are proud of
the products that they put forward.
Carthage calls this the
capstone experience.
That's kind of a higher
education buzzword.
And sometimes I think the
capstone is kind of nominal,
but in these three programs,
the capstone is really
literally a meaningful capstone.
- I guess I would second everything
that Jerry said about the senior thesis.
It really is a pretty
fantastic experience,
a really broad experience.
Brings together a lot of things
that students have learned
and develops really useful
skills in the job market
or graduate school skills,
such as learning how
to evaluate the quality
of massive amounts of
information on the internet.
It's so important to
be able to distinguish
between high quality information, so-so,
and also poor quality
information that's masquerading
as something maybe
better than it really is.
That's really important.
Learning how to synthesize
different kinds of information,
learning to have original thoughts,
like to come up with
meaningful research questions
and how to pursue them,
and how to put together a
presentation in writing,
to deliver orally,
to deliver to a small
audience or a large audience.
All of these skills are super portable
across different kinds of career paths,
so we think they're really valuable,
and that's something that
I and most of my colleagues
are really, really proud of
because I think we've had
some pretty good success with that.
Of course, the students really
deserve most of the credit.
They've been really fantastic.
I would say in terms of
distinguishing things,
learning experiences at Carthage,
we have a very rich array
of learning experiences
and the development of skills
that really cut across all
different kinds of career paths.
So, I think those things are hallmark.
Plus, being on Lake Michigan.
I mean... (chuckles)
The lake is so beautiful and amazing.
We're right up against the lake.
So, those are the things
that I think really make
a Carthage education distinctive.
- Ashley really opened
the door, being expansive
when she said what makes
your program unique.
I could talk even longer,
but I don't really want to,
about me, myself, and I.
As my two colleagues indicated
without being so specific,
there is a strong sense of
community at the college,
and there is a strong collective emphasis
on effective presentation
and effective writing.
I've been fortunate to stay employed
and, from my point of view,
have interesting jobs,
not all of them enjoyable,
from a young age.
I spent 20 years
at the Chicago Council on
Foreign Relations in working with
the president there and
others to build it up,
and then two years in a challenging
but ultimately successful turnaround
with the World Trade Center in Chicago,
which was in some trouble.
I had never previously dealt
with big business crowd.
Of necessity that was an important source
of program income for us.
I dealt a lot with corporate executives.
And one thing that struck
me about these men and women
is they all wrote extremely
clearly, very clearly,
and expressed themselves clearly,
and it really brought home to me
that above a certain level in
a challenging organization,
in the business world especially
but also in government and public service,
if you're not writing clearly,
you're not thinking as
clearly as you think you are.
That important skill and ability
is one thing that the
college really emphasizes.
I was an undergraduate
at UCLA many years ago,
where I got a fine education,
and then I went to graduate school
at another big institution.
You really had to assert yourself.
With all the other challenges
you have at your age,
you really have to grab ahold of yourself
and get to know a professor
at a place like that.
And I met very fine men and women,
but you really had to make yourself go
see them in their office, or
after class if you were lucky.
And the college is a
very nice contrast for me
because we really are a supportive.
But the main point without
talking even longer,
and longer, and longer, is clarity.
Clarity, the ability to
express yourself clearly.
You're thinking clearly,
and therefore you're gonna be effective
even in a tough corporate
working environment.
- Can I jump in--
(audio distorts)
One of the student attendees, Tyler,
asked a really good question
that I think other people
might be interested in hearing about,
and that's about double majors.
Would an international political economy
and political science double major
have to write two senior theses?
That sounds like it would be...
- No.
Yeah.
IPE is a program; it's not a department.
I defer to department chairs.
We have a number of econ majors.
We regularly have poli sci majors,
and what we do is work things out
so its essentially one thesis,
usually with some variation.
We have modern languages students.
We've had business students,
especially in finance.
And then, if it's fine
with the department,
it's fine with me,
and we work it out.
We're not only nice people.
We're reasonable people at Carthage.
- There wouldn't be any problems.
There wouldn't be any problems
between political science
and IPE, that's for sure.
(Professor Cyr chuckles)
- [Ashley] Wonderful.
Thank you.
For any of our students who
are watching this afternoon,
if you would like to meet individually
or have a phone conversation
with these faculty members,
they would be more than happy
if you think of questions later on.
But again, this recording
will be available
on our website here later this week,
along with the faculty members'
contact information as well.
But we thank you for joining us
in learning more about the programs,
and we look forward to
having you on campus soon.
- Take care, everybody.
