My first students

To continue with some biography…

My first full-time teaching job was at UC Irvine in 1988, a school with very good undergraduate students, including in economics.  I was fortunate enough to be assigned Honors Intermediate Micro for my very first class.

(My general view is that the second time I teach a given class is the best, but the very first time is the second best version of the class.  After that, unless I have a break of years, some of the material starts to feel too familiar to me, and I explain it less well and with less enthusiasm.)

I used the Nicholson text, as it had been pre-assigned, but I wished it had more economic intuition.

In any case I had seventeen students, and sixteen of them were Asian or Asian-American.  None of them were south Asian.  That was UC Irvine in those days (and perhaps still now?).

All but perhaps one were very good students.

That first year in my first class I was lucky enough to teach Stephen Jen.  Stephen, as you may know, later received a PhD from MIT, working with Paul Krugman.  He is these days a famous and highly respected currency analyst (among other things), and you will see his name often in the Financial Times.  He lives in London, and he and I had dinner but a few weeks ago.

Stephen at first was going to do electrical engineering, but it turned out economics was his true love.  I encouraged him to apply to graduate school, and wrote a very positive letter for him to MIT.  The rest is history, as they say.

I spent a good bit of time with Stephen outside of class, and even played basketball with him several times.  The summer of 1988 I also stayed with his family in Taipei, during a long Asia trip that I will write about some other time.

Most recently, Stephen has been known for having an early and very good call that the USD is going to decline, as indeed it did.

My second year at UC Irvine I taught the same class again.  I was lucky enough to have Jeffrey Ely in my class, and of course he did very well.  Jeff ended up studying for an economics PhD at UC Berkeley.

These days Jeff is a very well-known game theorist at Northwestern, arguably the number one school for game theory.  He took a more traditional academic path, whereas Stephen started at the IMF and then worked his way up through the world of finance.

Jeff for a while even had a presence in the blogosphere, and still you will find him on Twitter, though he has not posted in the last year.  In game theory, Jeff is highly creative and he approaches all problems by thinking like an economist.

As a person, he was always a bit more “hippie” than was Stephen, and I recall him giving me a tape of the Bob Dylan song “Million Dollar Bash,” from The Basement Tapes.

At George Mason, my best undergraduates often have been Chinese, but in terms of professional impact those are my two most successful undergraduate students ever.  Getting to know and teach them was one of the very best things about being at UC Irvine. My colleagues were great too, but that is the subject of another post.