On Mar. 25, as early as 8 a.m., a sea of suit-clad seniors settled into their seats across three classrooms in the Social Sciences building, ready to give their capstone presentations for the final time. As the faculty and capstone conveners of the Economics department watched, over 40 students of Economics presented their research, the culmination of a year’s worth of long hours and sleepless nights.

During the presentation, students were expected to showcase and analyze results of their projects in addition to explaining the research design and motivation behind their topic choice. Azmyra Merchant, Class of 2018, found the presentations and the discussions that followed very engaging.

“I think the presentations really depended on which session you were in. Some were a lot more heated than others,” she said. “The session I was in, for instance, was more cut-throat than others — a lot of questions, some were asked in a slightly more assertive manner — whereas others seemed a little more laid back. The discussion was always pretty dynamic, and it was actually pretty cool to see your friends actually doing something, and where their interests lie.”

The Economics capstone projects this year were as different from each other as possible. Spanning regions and countries across the world, they examined subjects like job mobility, corporate social responsibility, labor migration, cryptocurrencies and agricultural economies in various contexts.

Mina Kim and Angela Orozco, both Class of 2018 and working on projects based in Ghana, demonstrated this variety: while Kim studied the gender difference in returns to migration in the case of Ghana, Orozco’s paper evaluates the effect of mobile phone diffusion on the price dispersion of commodity markets in Ghana.

Many capstones aided, explored or challenged already existing literature. Laine Melkerte, Class of 2018, replicated a study done in schools in the Netherlands within an NYUAD context. Her study examined if the differences in study choices between genders were caused by competitiveness.

“Despite many initiatives embracing women representation in STEM fields, they are still less likely to graduate with a STEM degree from university,” Melkerte said. “In the past, people focused on external factors. But recently researchers have started considering psychological attributes, such as attitude towards risk and competitiveness, as potential explanations for such differences.”

Many of these projects pushed boundaries in some form or other. Some of the more experimental projects, for example, involved image analysis.

For Melkerte, the challenge was in an innovative methodology: she was the first undergraduate student at NYUAD to do a study using oTree, a software platform for economics experiments. For Alens Juns, Class of 2018, it was in the premise of his project itself.

“My capstone has more to do with finance. In the securities market the classic linear regression beta is most commonly calculated for stocks and it represents the responsiveness of the stock's price to changes in the market,” he explained. “So if a stock has a beta of 1.5 and the market goes up 10 percent the stock should in theory move up by 15 percent. However, this standard approach assumes that the stock will respond equally to the upside bull and downside bear market trends and this is the assumption I want to challenge.”

For students who plan to stay in academia, like Kim, capstone provides early exposure to the kind of research and analysis that PhD or Master’s programs require.

“Although it did not have a huge impact on my application, having independent research experience will likely pay off in the future when I have to conduct my own research. I expect research in the PhD program to be similar to my capstone experience, only more rigorous,” said Kim.

Orozco expressed a similar sentiment.

“In the end, I am using capstone as my entry ticket for graduate school: I needed a good recommender, which is why I chose the capstone mentor I chose, and I need a writing sample, “ she said. “I liked capstone because it forced me to do things that would look better in my CV and application for the jobs or graduate programs that I want; and on a personal level, I awakened my desire to continue on an academic trajectory.”

Others, however, saw their capstone as less directly relevant to their future careers.

“It's definitely an interesting point to bring up in interviews and conversations with faculty, but beyond that I see the capstone as mainly being a learning opportunity,” said Juns.

The process of the Economics capstone began at the end of last summer with students having to formulate their research topic before entering their senior year. The fall of senior year involved bi-weekly presentations, while spring was an opportunity for the students to work closely with their mentors and polish their project.

Some projects went beyond the scope of this year-long research and became personally meaningful. Melkerte’s project not only helped her with job interviews in the education sector, but also bolstered debates with friends, family and even potential employers on the relevance of the issue.

Kim also felt intellectually challenged: “I found capstone to be very different from regular coursework, since I have to create new knowledge as opposed to consuming what's already found. It definitely pushed me to think more creatively and analytically, in order to find a question that hasn't been answered and to present the results in a convincing way.”

But despite the gainful learning outcomes, students emphasized that there were struggles — with reasons ranging from quality and availability of the data, to distributed questionnaires left unanswered, to uncooperative analytical softwares. Establishing a working routine with faculty advisor too was a part of the learning process.

Orozco admits that the capstone project can come with an incredible amount of pressure.

“Initially I was very excited and wanted to do all kind of things with my capstone and I still want to, but through the year I have realised that it’s a process and that adding extra pressure for your senior year is not a good idea,” she said. “So instead, I started to see capstone as an learning exercise, because that's what it was: I had never written an economics paper of that kind and so I was exposed to little of how the world of research works … but I knew that maybe my paper would not change the world. So as I took the unnecessary pressure off, I could just give my best and get it done.”