Graduates of its undergraduate and Ph.D. programs in the Department of Economics have had an impact not only on economics but also on a wide range of industries around the world. We are always interested in hearing from our alumni and look forward to sharing your successes. To submit a class note and read more about interacting with current economics students, please visit our Alumni page.
Class of 1996
Kerwin Charles
On March 5, 2019, Kerwin Charles '96 was named the next Indra K. Nooyi Dean of the Yale School of Management (SOM). His appointment will start on July 1, 2019. Read the YaleNews announcement "Economist Kerwin Charles Named Yale SOM Dean" here.
Class of 2012
Douglas Webber
This fall, Douglas Webber '12 shared his "CV of Failures" on Twitter to support graduate students and junior faculty confronting failure in academia. Webber's experience and CV were featured as a front-page story titled, "Temple professor shares CV of shortcomings; Turning failures into success," in the January 11, 2019 issue of the Philly Inquirer.
In his CV, Webber details his graduate school admission process, journal rejections, referee comments, and a hilarious teaching fail. "The economist hopes his brutal honesty in the alternate CV shows graduate students and junior faculty that they shouldn't get discouraged by the inevitable failures that will come in their career. It's a rite of passage in academia," the Philly Inquirer article states.
Webber begins his CV of Failures by declaring the following: "In an era where many people selectively put only positive personal news on social media, it can be very easy to feel like everyone else is more successful than you. This can be an even easier trap to fall into for those in academia because our CV’s sometimes feel like completely public job performance reviews. We look at our own CV’s and see every “failure”, recalling the rejections and (sometimes nasty) negative referee comments, but those blemishes are invisible when we view the record of any colleague. I’m writing this document primarily for graduate students and junior faculty who may at times feel overwhelmed or like they aren’t able to cut it in academia. It is in the spirit of the advice I often received from my advisor (Ron Ehrenberg), and is also motivated by a great article in Nature by Dr. Melanie Stefan." (Webber, Curriculum Vitae, August 2018)
Douglas Webber is a 2012 graduate of our Ph.D. program and is an Associate Professor of Economics at Temple University. He testified on risk-sharing policies and higher education before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in 2015.
View the Twitter thread and conversation here.
Read Webber's CV of Failures here.
Visit his Temple University faculty profile page here.
