Interview with Matthias Emmanuel HӒNSEL, PhD student in Economics

I am a second year PhD student at the Department of Economics of the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE). My main area of research is Macroeconomics. While my current projects involve housing markets and monetary policy, I am also interested in labor markets and “long-run” topics such as Structural Change.

My motivation for considering CIVICA ESR courses was that I knew several other CIVICA partner universities having experts working in my fields of interest, so I naturally checked out whether there were courses that could be beneficial for developing and implementing my own research ideas. The reason I decided to sign up specifically for that course at SciencesPo is that macroeconomic modelling relies heavily on numerical methods, so getting a better understanding of them should be useful for my research. Also, it seemed like a good opportunity to improve my skills in the Julia programming language, which was used for the class.

Overall, my experience with the class was very good. The course teacher not only provided extensive lecture material, but also did a good job in creating an interactive atmosphere despite everything being online.

While my experience with CIVICA seminars and workshops is limited, I would definitely recommend checking out the CIVICA PhD course offering. It gives you access not only to more experts to learn from, but also opportunities to interact with other students from outside your home institution.