Imagine you are an HR professional at a firm. This firm is considering hiring freshers in the placement season this coming academic year (2023-24). How should you think about your hiring this year? It is a slightly different, but fairly similar conversation in the case of lateral hires. We’re about to find out very soon, … Continue reading “How Would You Think About Hiring Freshers This Year?”
All that is well and good: a high quality, low scale, not very cheap university that gives away it’s plans and implementation details for free. But what would students and faculty in such a university, well, do? There are two ways to answer this question. First, work out what they do in most universities today, … Continue reading “But What Will We Do?”
True story, the one that I am about to narrate, although both the person in question and the firm will remain unnamed. A firm had come on campus for placements, and I happened to know one of the people who happened to be on their recruitment team that day. Midway through the recruitment process, said … Continue reading “Yes, But What Did You *Do*?”
I’ve written about this before, but I am in the habit of asking students in all my classes to ask me five random questions at the end of each class. As you might imagine, one of the inevitable questions in a semester almost always is “Why do you ask us to ask you these five … Continue reading “Not So Random After All”
I really liked Patrick OShaugnessy’s reply to a question that Kunal Shah asked on Twitter recently: It’s not just mediocre team members at a start-up, of course, it’s everywhere. As Gulzar Natarajan pointed out in a blogpost a while ago, it is also a problem with bureaucrats in government: Are meetings organised most effectively – … Continue reading “On Productivity”
The title of today’s blogpost has been copied, word for word, from a blogpost I had linked to earlier (the fifth link in this post). It’s been about two and a half years since I read that post. I would still like to believe that Deirdre McCloskey was wrong, and that you can too teach … Continue reading “Can Undergraduates Be Taught To Think Like Economists?”
This post is based on a discussion with a student about (what else?) unhappiness with marks. What is the point of an education? Is it to score marks? Or to score a job? Or to better oneself? Or all of the above? And if it is all of the above, is it 33.333% weightage to … Continue reading “Project Based Learning”
This post is a rewrite of an earlier post, but it is worth writing about it again, for two reasons. First, it is start of undergrad thesis time at the Gokhale Institute. And second, the point of this post helps people think better, which is always and everywhere a good idea. What is the post … Continue reading “One Sentence and One Sentence Only”
A Danish artist who pocketed large sums of money lent to him by a museum – and submitted empty frames as his artwork – has been ordered by a court to repay the funds. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/18/danish-artist-jens-haaning-empty-frames-ordered-repay So begins an article in the Guardian (h/t John Burn-Murdoch on Twitter). It is a short article, won’t take more … Continue reading “What Are You Optimizing For, Weird Art Edition”
About three weeks ago, Gulzar Natarajan wrote a blogpost titled “25 economic orthodoxies that should be discarded“. The list is fascinating and worth thinking about. Doubly so if you are learning or teaching economics, and each of his twenty-five picks is worthy of discussion. So worthy, in fact, that a blogpost probably won’t be enough … Continue reading “No Free Markets”
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