studentwise: A WIDER LENS

“One perspective, experience, and culture will only answer a select amount of questions,” says Danika Grieser ’26. “And economists want to answer them all.” Adds Melody Herrera-Garcia ’26 “Diversity allows new topics to be brought into the light.”

That was a key theme of the Expanding Diversity in Economics Summer Institute at the University of Chicago, in which Grieser and Herrera-Garcia participated in June. The highly competitive program finds and supports talented undergraduates from diverse backgrounds.

They were “immersed in a world of economics in every dimension,” says Grieser, an economics and political science major and McCabe Scholar from Doylestown, Pa. Leading professors from Chicago and the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics shared insights that ranged from macro and micro economics to statistics and calculus to coding. But it was a mutual exchange of ideas.

“They wanted us to ask questions and to discover flaws in their work,” says Grieser. “They were defending and improving their work in front of a group of students eager to learn.”

The students met with five Nobel Prize laureates, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and visited places such as the U.S. Capitol, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Chicago Federal Reserve. Institute Director Michael Greenstone ’91, hosted and moderated lectures. It was equally important for students to interact with one another — and hear perspectives to which they could relate.

“It felt amazing to talk to someone with whom you can truly connect and hash out what it means to develop an identity in this field,” says Herrera-Garcia, an economics and studio art major and Evans Scholar who was born in the Bronx, N.Y., and lives in Allentown, Pa.

Grieser belongs to the Swarthmore Indigenous Students Association, Herrera-Garcia to the Latinx student organization ENLACE.

Both had struggled to envision a future for themselves in the field of economics, with only 15 percent of students majoring in the subject nationally being Black, Hispanic, or Native American. But their experience this summer helped to dispel that.

“The program blew me away,” says Herrera-Garcia. “It opened my eyes to a future in this field, and gave me the inspiration to continue along this path.”