Congratulations to Stacy Dickert-Conlin, this year’s recipient of the College of Social Science Outstanding Teacher Award! The award honors the best undergraduate instructors in the college and faculty are nominated by students. Currently Stacy teaches “Big Ideas in Social Sciences” - ISS 205. This course is a multidisciplinary course created by Stacy and Steven Haider to introduce non-majors to concepts and ideas in economics. This class is quite innovative. Stacy covers a myriad of modern questions in economics interspersed with “TED” talk style presentations by guest faculty. The students consistently praise this setup in their course reviews as well as Stacy’s passion and care for student learning. Previously, Stacy also spent many years teaching “Intermediate Microeconomics” – EC 301. Through this course she shepherded hundreds of students into the econ major, many of whom she made lifelong impacts on. This comes out in support letters from her former students. One student says that Stacy “consistently paired high standards with clarity, accessibility, and encouragement” and talked glowingly of her interest in helping students both inside and outside the classroom. Stacy also created, along with Mike Conlin, the “Economics of London” class for our study abroad program which has successfully melded economics with an excellent international travel and learning experience for students by connecting visits to real life locations to economic themes and history. As another of her students put it, “by integrating site-based learning with academic content she transformed the city into a classroom.”
So let me give my hearty congratulations and thanks to Stacy for her dedication to teaching and our students. This is a well-deserved award, and we are all really proud and happy to have her as a representative of the great instruction that our economics faculty strive to provide.
-Message from Professor Scott Imberman, MSU Economics chair.