C.What is the academic experience, project, class, or book that has influenced or inspired you?
So there I stood tracing the paper displaying the results of the stock market with my index finger, looking altogether dumbfounded.
XOM had gone down 20 points. I lost $50,000. As a rush of blood flushed my face and sweat lingered on my forehead, I helplessly panicked.
With all that said, a three month Economics Stock market school project has consumed my lifestyle, influencing my habits, interests, and emotions. Nonetheless, that was the closest I got to the Wall Street as a senior in high school.
November 1, 2008. That was the day Mr. Clement proposed an optional school project for his students to experience firsthand the risky stock market system. The rule of the game was simple. Beat the system by gaining as much profit as possible by buying and selling stocks with $100,000 in our bank accounts. The incentive to winning the project was just what every student wanted, a boost to our grades. So we began.
Accustomed to Ace-ing my projects, I was determined to win. This project freed me to explore all possible shares in a business, decide the value of a stock, and gamble-something usually frowned upon by my superiors. Learning the price was easy: all I had to do was just look it up in the newspaper or scrutinize finance.yahoo.com. Determining the value of the business was the hard part. In order to find the stock's profitability, I had to dig deeper into other factors-- demand for its product, its competition, unionization of workers, consumer loyalty, government regulation, taxes, and etc. For the next three months I found myself intellectually engaged in this daily routine, investigating and researching background information for a shot in the jackpot.
The unpredictability of the stock prices made this particular school project all the more challenging, but I relied on the theory of consistently rising oil prices in organizing my stock portfolio. To my horror, the OPEC had some surprises under its sleeves and oil prices dropped drastically. My theory based on background information and past stock patterns had crashed and burned, leaving me with half my savings and reality's cruel 'I told you so' .
Regrettably I placed almost dead last in the game. Academically ahead of the class, I was betrayed by mere chance. However, the stock market experience profoundly impacted me intellectually. Through this project, what I gained was an economist's perspective that background information, despite its importance, is only a guideline to how the economy functions. Through that conclusion, I validated how the coexistence of practical and theoretical elements is acceptable in the field of economics. More importantly, I independently conducted research on the building stones of our economy and even found thrill through a fake partake in the economic process. Thanks to the stock market project, I'm starting to think like an economist. I find myself ready to ride the economic pendulum, testing my theories in the real world
