ECON 4365

Ana Fostel is an absolute joy of a professor. She is so passionate about what she is teaching and is a very engaging professor. The content is challenging, but she is very approachable and helpful with answering questions before exams. I don't normally go to office hours, but since the content is challenging and dense it was really helpful to be able to ask what I need to actually study and know for the exam. Exams are pretty much based exactly off problem sets, and there were 3 midterms and a final. We had 4 problem sets total and they were relatively approachable. We had to use MATLAB to code for some of the answers, and I hate anything coding related, but the TAs usually posted their code and from there is was also an exact copy and paste. There is no outside work to this class with the exception of the 4 problem sets, and only the second one was pretty difficult and took me 7 hour, but the others took me an hour or two. Overall this class is doable, but the content isn't easy so you have to be interested enough to put in the work to do well.

Do not, do not, do not take this class. If you are thinking of taking this class, do not :)

It is nothing like the courseforum. The tests are a total “gotcha” game where they say no proof or no state the theorem and then put it on there anyway. The grading is beyond punitive (I’ve done every pre-req in the Econ major and multiple electives and never had an issue). If you get 1a wrong and that number is used for 1b-e, even if the b-e is perfect outside of that number they give you almost no credit.

I genuinely have no idea how this course forum page came to be unless we just had the worst TAs ever. The lectures are extremely dense and it’s basically reading off long slides the whole time. Literally take anything else — ruined my semester and gave me panic attacks before exams.

The worst ECON class I have taken to date...I honestly would rather go through Intermediate Micro again 10 times over. There are 3 midterm exams, all of which were way too long to complete in the allotted time, not to mention how they test everything BUT your understanding of the topic. You could make the slightest computation error and receive 1-3 points on a 15-point question.

Lecture slides are bloated with complex formulas that I honestly to god couldn't understand or apply. When completing the problem sets I had to sift through the MATLab code just to figure out how to compute a question.

I will say Professor Fostel is clearly very passionate, and she is super approachable during office hours; the TAs, on the other hand...they consistently gave me conflicting information on what will be tested and what won't be. I'm unsure if Professor Fostel is a part of the grading process because when I went to her office hours to ask why I was deducted points for a specific question, she directed me to the TAs? I found this strange because it was her class at the end of the day. But yeah, the TAs will grade your exam like they have a personal vendetta against you.

All in all, do NOT take this class. Take any other ECON elective. It's just not worth it, and it absolutely ruined my semester.