‘We’re Going to Be Policymakers Today’

Fed Challenge (Econ 353)

Inflation is on everyone’s minds and mouths right now. While most of us are digesting the topic in our daily news reports, students in Professor Michael Connolly’s class were eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner last fall.

To prepare for the 2022 College Fed Challenge — a nationwide competition — Connolly’s students spent the semester analyzing economic and financial conditions in order to present a monetary policy recommendation to the Federal Reserve.

“From the first few weeks, it was a sprint to the finish,” Connolly says.

“It really did go from 0 to 60, starting early on,” confirms Nikola Duka ’24, an economics major from Worcester, Mass.

In the beginning of the semester, the class voted on who would comprise the fiveperson presentation team and who would be on the research team.

The class then spent a month reading, analyzing, deliberating, and practicing. “I push my students; I don’t hold back,” Connolly asserts. “I say, ‘We’re going to be policymakers today.’”

On Oct. 6, they submitted their 15-minute video presentation for the first round of competition. “Basically, they covered the key themes that the Fed cares about: inflation, labor market, real economy, financial markets,” Connolly explains, “and then they made a policy proposal based on different scenarios that might occur going forward.”

If the team were to succeed, they’d advance to the second, and final, round. “It was really well done,” Connolly says.

Turns out, the Fed agreed. The morning of Nov. 9, the presentation team logged on to Zoom, preparing to be grilled for 15 minutes by four judges from the Fed while their professor and research teammates watched. They listened to the intro and told the judges their team number — assigned, to retain anonymity in the 18-team finals. The group’s strategy involved splitting into “tortoises” and “hares.” “Hares would jump on the question; they would give a broad overview and give the tortoises time to think,” explains Duka, a tortoise.

Max Parrott ’24, who was also a tortoise, adds: “We divided it into inflation, labor, finance/policy, and output. We had two tortoises and one hare for each, but with an understanding that we’ve all looked at the topics so much that if someone missed something, anyone else could jump in. There’s a bit of an art to it.”

Afterward, still trying to remember all that happened in the rapid-fire round, Duka reflects, “It was intense.” Still, the group felt prepared. “There was nothing that we hadn’t discussed at least once,” adds Parrott, an economics major from Bedford, N.Y. “I was really proud of the team.”

As campus was about to depart for Thanksgiving break, the team learned that they won first place in the New York District; the other finalists were RutgersNew Brunswick and SUNY Geneseo. The Colgate team also received an honorable mention in the nationals, alongside University of Notre Dame and UCLA.

“They put in a tremendous amount of work this semester and it paid off,” Connolly says.

Parrott concludes: “It’s by far the most I’ve ever walked away from a class where I’ve thought, ‘Not only do I feel like I learned about this economic topic, but I also understand the world a lot better.’”

More about the professor: Connolly taught Fed Challenge for the first time in the fall, but it wasn’t his first experience with the competition. He competed twice as a student at Rutgers, where his team made it to the finals both times. “It was the most rewarding experience of my undergraduate education,” he says. “Seeing how much that mattered for my career and my friends who competed, I knew this had tremendous value,” adds Connolly, whose first job after college was at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.