Kerk Phillips and I founded the BYU Macroeconomics and Computational Laboratory (MCL) in March 2012 in the Department of Economics at Brigham Young University thanks to support from an anonymous donor, the BYU College of Family, Home and Social Sciences, and the BYU Department of Economics. The simplest description of the MCL is that it is a mentored research environment of a select group of undergraduate students and faculty. The mission of the MCL is to train undergraduate students in advanced programming and computational methods that are useful for solving dynamic economic modeling problems in order for them to have the opportunity to make coauthor-level contributions to research projects. We use three main outcomes to measure the success of the MCL.
Research projects (publications and working papers) to which our students have made a coauthor-level contribution.
Student presentations of research at academic conferences.
Student placements after graduation in both graduate programs and private sector jobs.
Since the beginning of the MCL in 2012, we have received over $700,000 of grant funding for the MCL (see Grants page). This funding pays for student salaries, computing resources, conference travel for students and faculty mentors to present research, and supplies. Each January, we solicit applications to the MCL from undergraduate students with mathematics prerequisites, computer science training, and core economics training. This year's cohort is 16 students, with an average GPA of 3.91, most of whom are double majors in mathematics and economics. Five of those students are in the Applied and Computational Mathematics Emphasis (ACME) in the BYU math major.
Boot Camp
Each year at the beginning of Spring term (end of April), we admit the new cohort of undergraduate MCL students, who are typically either Juniors or Seniors. These students make a one-year commitment to stay in the program, and the MCL commits to fund them as paid student researchers during that time. Their first experience in the MCL is an intense 7-week training consisting of 6 credit hours of coursework (Math 513R and Econ 413R), which training is affectionately referred to as "Boot Camp". The students put in an average of 60 hours per week during Boot Camp in attending class and completing assignments and labs. We pay the students an hourly wage for 40 hours per week during Boot Camp. The topics in the two courses are divided into mathematical theory, economic theory, and computational methods. A list of the topics covered in Boot Camp is available online here (http://byumcl.bitbucket.org/bootcamp2015/).
The math portion of the MCL Boot Camp is taken directly from the ACME curriculum, focusing on the fundamentals of optimization. The economics portion of Boot Camp is divided into two parts--economic theory and computational methods. Economic topics include overlapping generations models, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, perturbation method solutions approach, dynamic programming, asset pricing, simulated method of moments estimation, and parallel computing (click here for table of contents of unpublished textbook of MCL economics curriculum). The computational portion is a series of Python labs, all of which are freely available online, that teach students scientific computing and economic model solution methods using the Python programming language. These Python labs come primarily from the large set of open source labs developed in the ACME program as well as from the http://quant-econ.net/ chapters from Thomas Sargent and John Stachurski.
A final note about Boot Camp is that it is designed to be difficult enough that it cannot be done working by oneself. The students are forced to learn how to effectively collaborate in order to solve problems, debug code, and maximize the benefit of each others strengths. This is a unique learning format that is extremely valuable for their subsequent research. They also learn how to use the open source version control platform of Git in turning in assignments, which helps them to be able to collaborate through this platform later in their research.
Mentored Research
When the students finish the MCL Boot Camp in the end of July, we hold a meeting in which multiple faculty members present research ideas to the students for which the faculty member would like to have an MCL student with which to work. We then simply match students to projects with professors. However, this matching is different in that the students are not to simply be research assistants. The point of the MCL Boot Camp training is to give them the tools to be able to make a co-author level contribution to their mentored research project. The student is expected to help develop the theory, perform the computation, overcome roadblocks, and be an entrepreneurial partner with the professor. The student is paid to work 40 hours per week on this project during the Summer term (July and August), and then 20 hours per week during the Fall and Winter semesters (September to April).
MCL Student Outcomes
Here is a list of publications and working papers that students have worked on. The MCL also uses its funding to send students to present at conferences. And we have a tremendous track record of placing our students in the best graduate programs and in excellent private sector jobs.