AIER’s 2017 Summer Fellowship Program Starts
Yesterday, June 26, we welcome the 2017 class of summer fellows. AIER’s Summer Fellowship Program, started in 1946, continues to attract high-caliber students from prestigious colleges and universities across the United States. Preserving the legacy of AIER’s founder Col. E.C. Harwood, the program adopts an experiential-learning format where students are actively engaged with staff researchers in research projects pertaining to AIER’s research agenda.
AIER’s Summer Fellowship Program consists of three components: research, education, and culture.
- The research component emphasizes engaging students in their research project, thereby allowing them to learn by doing, to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world issues, and to think critically about various methodologies and ways to manipulate data.
- The education component provides an opportunity to broaden the scope of intellectual inquiry by participating in seminars and round-table discussions with professional economists of AIER and speakers invited from academia and industry alike. Students receive the reading material to study in depth ahead of time, and can ask questions in a small-group setting during the seminars.
- The cultural component provides an opportunity to explore the Berkshires’ cultural offerings to broaden the cultural horizon of the students. We bring students to Tanglewood and Norman Rockwell Museum for special events and ground tours. To complete the diversity of genres, we take students to a Shakespeare and Company production.
This summer, we will attend the rehearsal of the Tanglewood Music Center Opening Exercises at Ozawa Hall; see a production of “Cymbeline” at Shakespeare & Company; and visit the new exhibition “Inventing America: Rockwell and Warhol” with the guidance of the museum curator at Norman Rockwell Museum.
Experiential learning can bridge classroom knowledge with the workplace by laying a foundation for the development of economic research expertise. Students participating in AIER’s Summer Fellowship Program experience the workplace environment, with all of its challenges, learn soft skills needed to navigate that environment, and establish a base of experiences on which they can build. Supported by qualitative evidence from students’ reflections in previous years, we are confident that our structured experiential-learning model helps students to develop, refine, and retain those skills, preserving the legacies of John Dewey and of E.C. Harwood.
Picture: Summer 2017 Class of Student Fellows and Interns. Front Row (L to R): Natalia Smirnova (AIER), Bob Hughes (AIER), Rhett Maiorana, Jena Nielsen, Junsheng Yuan, Benjamin Williams, Matt Kehoe, Forest Davis-Hollander. Second Row (L to R): Max Gulker (AIER), Peter Donahue, Luke Delorme (AIS), Bryce Schuler, Kevin Coakley, Evan Sylbert. Photographer: Michelle Ryan.
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