BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Two Illinois Wesleyan University classes are taking advantage of a wealth of information from local sources in Bloomington, and returning the favor by providing new insights on the data – all part of a collaboration with the city the University calls home.
“I really wanted my students to get into the local community,” said Associate Professor of German and Eastern European Studies Sonja Fritzsche. In her German 488: Von Demokratie zur Diktatur (From Democracy to Dictatorship) class students are introduced to the concept of German immigration by translating old, German-language newspapers from the Bloomington-Normal area that are housed at the McLean County Museum of History’s archives.
For Associate Professor of Economics Diego Mendez-Carbajo, the idea of using real data from the City of Bloomington for his new class titled Economics 370: Time Series Analysis was more than a good way to study financial and economic variables.
“Quantitative analysis skills are one of the comparative advantages that business and economics majors bring to the job market,” said Mendez-Carbajo, who noted students who take the class should be able to look at a long series of observations and discern the patterns. “I wanted students to learn about the data-gathering process itself. At the very least I would like them to be the one person that steps forward when their future boss or supervisor asks ‘can anybody make sense of these numbers?’”