Hi everyone. This is my sop for a university I am applying to. I would be wondered if you criticized it.
At first glance, one may think of my academic course as a desultory. A mathematics student, researching into Austrian economics as well as philosophy, who is also working as a journalist. The crux of this amalgamation, however, incorporates an order which amazes me myself. The development of my academic career is in fact an odyssey, in the line of which my understanding of the goals I am after, has evolved.
As a NODET (National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents) student living in a Middle Eastern country the dominating tradition of which only respects and values degrees in engineering fields merely for the sake of their job opportunities within a third world community, I was expected not to be interested in either economics or philosophy. It was a beautiful, yet superficial aim of a young high school student whose perception of the field was to improve the lifestyle of a nation, when I demonstrated my will to study economics; however, it was soon squelched by the evident lack of quality in undergraduate curriculum of Iranian universities.Thus, I chose industrial mathematics as my major in order to develop necessary skills needed for a proficient economist.
During my first semesters, while my fellow students were doing their regular homework, I was seeking connections between my newly gained knowledge from the mathematics courses I had taken and economics. I still feel the grotesqueness of that moments when I sat beside graduate students in economic classes dealing with mathematical models of micro and macroeconomics. I was only a sophomore, when I started my job in ***, a well-known economic newspaper in Iran, as a translator, which instituted an important set of my skills, to write coherently and in an organized way. As a result of my efforts for developing my writing skills in accordance with the wide audience and critics of such a newspaper, now I have gained enough credence to have my own weekly column, in which I write about different economic concepts from a philosophical perspective.
Although I had studied philosophy parallel to economics due to my personal interests, it was during the course of Epistemology of Economics that I eventually became capable of combining my disparate sights of economics and philosophy. This new era of my academic life, a result of which was my first book, Essays on the Economic Way of Thinking, which is a translation of Dr. ***'s essays, was undoubtedly a turning point that altered my perspective on economics, as a result of which, my research interests tended to have a more philosophical essence. In fact, with the knowledge I have obtained by working on several projects with my professor, Dr. ***, which are for the new edition of his book, Epistemology of Economics, I have come to the conclusion that investigating economic issues is essentially connected with philosophy. This perception raised a whole new series of questions in my mind, mainly consisting the epistemological rootages of different economic schools. This investigation of mine on different schools of economics, one of whose results is a set of translations of Karl Pribram's articles, also involved me in methodological aspects of economics, which triggered the start of another book, Methodology of Economics, along with Dr. ***, the purpose of which is to look into the different methodological approaches in economics from an epistemological point of view.
This whole package of research has determined the exact domain in which my interest for a deeper investigation lies, the history of modern economic thought. As Karl Pribram writes in one of his major papers, Prolegomena to a History of Economic Thought, ``In the last analysis it has always been a method which has decided the object and the scope of economics as of any other science.'', I am willing to continue my research on different methodological approaches in economics by examining their epistemological origins, especially a comparison of praxeology and instrumentalism. Instrumentalism regardless of its wide acceptance among economists, obviously worths a more precise inspection. Moreover, the praxeological method, which applies an axiomatic method to social science, deserves a meticulous examining, especially since there is a conflict of reasoning between the two major praxeologists, Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. While Mises considers the axiom of human action a priori to human experience due to his Kantian position in epistemology, Rothbard argues that a person becomes aware of the mentioned axiom through experience in the world, and thus justifies it as a law of reality which is empirical rather than a priori.
In my cumbersome quest for finding an appropriate graduate school, I was fascinated the moment at which I realized about ***'s *** program. Furthermore, I was even more thrilled when I found out that Professor *** is a faculty of that center, since his work has had a great influence on the development of my career. His book, ***, was one of my first sources for understanding the history of Austrian school. I strongly believe that ***'s unequaled program in *** along with Professor ***'s adequate knowledge of history of economic thought, economic methodology and also of Austrian school, all of which highly match the research which I am eager to pursue, would make my experience in that university motivating and challenging.
At first glance, one may think of my academic course as a desultory. A mathematics student, researching into Austrian economics as well as philosophy, who is also working as a journalist. The crux of this amalgamation, however, incorporates an order which amazes me myself. The development of my academic career is in fact an odyssey, in the line of which my understanding of the goals I am after, has evolved.
As a NODET (National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents) student living in a Middle Eastern country the dominating tradition of which only respects and values degrees in engineering fields merely for the sake of their job opportunities within a third world community, I was expected not to be interested in either economics or philosophy. It was a beautiful, yet superficial aim of a young high school student whose perception of the field was to improve the lifestyle of a nation, when I demonstrated my will to study economics; however, it was soon squelched by the evident lack of quality in undergraduate curriculum of Iranian universities.Thus, I chose industrial mathematics as my major in order to develop necessary skills needed for a proficient economist.
During my first semesters, while my fellow students were doing their regular homework, I was seeking connections between my newly gained knowledge from the mathematics courses I had taken and economics. I still feel the grotesqueness of that moments when I sat beside graduate students in economic classes dealing with mathematical models of micro and macroeconomics. I was only a sophomore, when I started my job in ***, a well-known economic newspaper in Iran, as a translator, which instituted an important set of my skills, to write coherently and in an organized way. As a result of my efforts for developing my writing skills in accordance with the wide audience and critics of such a newspaper, now I have gained enough credence to have my own weekly column, in which I write about different economic concepts from a philosophical perspective.
Although I had studied philosophy parallel to economics due to my personal interests, it was during the course of Epistemology of Economics that I eventually became capable of combining my disparate sights of economics and philosophy. This new era of my academic life, a result of which was my first book, Essays on the Economic Way of Thinking, which is a translation of Dr. ***'s essays, was undoubtedly a turning point that altered my perspective on economics, as a result of which, my research interests tended to have a more philosophical essence. In fact, with the knowledge I have obtained by working on several projects with my professor, Dr. ***, which are for the new edition of his book, Epistemology of Economics, I have come to the conclusion that investigating economic issues is essentially connected with philosophy. This perception raised a whole new series of questions in my mind, mainly consisting the epistemological rootages of different economic schools. This investigation of mine on different schools of economics, one of whose results is a set of translations of Karl Pribram's articles, also involved me in methodological aspects of economics, which triggered the start of another book, Methodology of Economics, along with Dr. ***, the purpose of which is to look into the different methodological approaches in economics from an epistemological point of view.
This whole package of research has determined the exact domain in which my interest for a deeper investigation lies, the history of modern economic thought. As Karl Pribram writes in one of his major papers, Prolegomena to a History of Economic Thought, ``In the last analysis it has always been a method which has decided the object and the scope of economics as of any other science.'', I am willing to continue my research on different methodological approaches in economics by examining their epistemological origins, especially a comparison of praxeology and instrumentalism. Instrumentalism regardless of its wide acceptance among economists, obviously worths a more precise inspection. Moreover, the praxeological method, which applies an axiomatic method to social science, deserves a meticulous examining, especially since there is a conflict of reasoning between the two major praxeologists, Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. While Mises considers the axiom of human action a priori to human experience due to his Kantian position in epistemology, Rothbard argues that a person becomes aware of the mentioned axiom through experience in the world, and thus justifies it as a law of reality which is empirical rather than a priori.
In my cumbersome quest for finding an appropriate graduate school, I was fascinated the moment at which I realized about ***'s *** program. Furthermore, I was even more thrilled when I found out that Professor *** is a faculty of that center, since his work has had a great influence on the development of my career. His book, ***, was one of my first sources for understanding the history of Austrian school. I strongly believe that ***'s unequaled program in *** along with Professor ***'s adequate knowledge of history of economic thought, economic methodology and also of Austrian school, all of which highly match the research which I am eager to pursue, would make my experience in that university motivating and challenging.