Microeconomics Guide, Macro Experience
From left: Carlisle High-Schoolers Jake Milligan and David Erfle; John "Jay" Mayers '16, international business & management (IB&M) major, and Steve Erfle, associate professor of IB&M. Photo by Carl Socolow '77.
Students, alumni contribute to forthcoming textbook and guide
by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson
John “Jay” Mayers ’16 (international business & management) isn’t just reading a textbook for his research project; he’s enhancing it. As a summer intern for Associate Professor of International Business & Management Steve Erfle, this Student Investment Group (SIG) board member is cowriting two online guides that will accompany Erfle’s forthcoming book on intermediate microeconomics—a book that includes sections written by two alumni.
Erfle originally wrote the text under a 2005 contract with a publisher that later merged with another publishing house, shelving the project, and he recently found a new publisher. The challenge was to take material written a decade ago—back when Twitter was still only a birdsong, Facebook was a student-only pastime and posts were, generally speaking, stakes in the ground—and make it fresh to a new crop of students who’ve come of age in a rapidly changing business and communications landscape.
Enter the student guide. Written by three college students and edited by Erfle, it will be available, via password, on the textbook’s website. Different than a workbook or study guide, Erfle explains, it presents the modern student’s perspective on how to approach the material, along with an outline of chapter materials and discussions of important equations or graphs. It also collects all of a given chapter’s definitions for easier review and presents them in a student voice.
Erfle had sought feedback on the book from more than a dozen students over the years, but the inspiration for the student-authored guide came to him by way of Ben Greene ’14. An international business & management major and SIG board member who interned with Erfle in 2012, Greene worked on Erfle's managerial-economics textbook. Greene's assertion that contemporary students come to college with different educational experiences—and that corresponding approaches, such as bite-sized sections, are advisable—set the stage for the current project.
Mayers came on board this summer, along with two Carlisle natives who had taken introductory-level economics courses at Dickinson while in high school. Jacob Milligan earned a scholarship to study in classes with associate professors David Sarcone (international busines & management) and Andrew Farrant (economics), while Erfle’s son, David, took classes with Professor of Economics Bill Bellinger (economics) and Associate Professor of Mathematics Jeffrey Forrester.
All three summer interns are writing the student guide and reviewing the text, highlighting passages that are unclear or out of date. “For example, 10 years ago, Internet access could be used to describe the bandwagon effect, but that example is now dated,” Erfle explained. “A better current example of the bandwagon effect is online video gaming.”
The text also includes scholarship by alumni. Jue “Jessie” Wang ’12, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in economics at the University of California-San Diego, contributed material on asymmetric information. J. Kerry Waller ’92 (economics)—who taught international business & management classes at Dickinson (2009-11) before joining Piedmont College as assistant professor of economics—wrote a section on game theory.
Mayers will continue to work with Erfle to co-author an online instructor’s guide. He plans to sit in on Erfle’s fall Managerial Decision-Making course, and will work with fellow international business & management major Nick DellaVecchia to help augment it, again from a student viewpoint.
When he graduates in the spring, Mayers will have published two textbook guides and will have experience in course presentation and textbook review—not to mention an advanced understanding of the information covered in Erfle’s textbook. “I certainly feel the material I worked with will give me a leg up over competitors,” he said.
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Published August 31, 2015