New Andrew Young School Scholarship Promotes Undergraduate Economic Research

ATLANTA—Georgia State University freshman Seojin “Sam” Kim (B.S. in Economics) received the first Zeinah Danielle Aouani scholarship earlier this year. This new award is designed to promote undergraduate research in economics.

The scholarship provides financial support for outstanding undergraduate students majoring in economics who have a minimum GPA of 3.2 and are registered for a research course. It was established by Zaier Aouani and economist Seunghae Grace Eau, a clinical associate professor in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, in memory of their beloved daughter.

Kim assisted Eau in analyzing data and developed an algorithm to investigate how students use online learning platforms for an Adaptive Learning Platform project funded by the Gates Foundation.

“Dr. Eau is researching how we can help students perform their best,” said Kim. “Our first step was to study how much students thought they knew versus what they actually knew, which is called the ‘metacognitive ability’ of students.”

As of early May, they were cleaning up data for the final stages of the project. Presentations and a paper will follow.

“During this project, I got very familiar with the software used in economic research, such as STATA and Python,” said Kim. “These are things you can’t learn without hands-on experience. I was very glad Dr. Eau gave me access to these tools.”

Kim admitted that he had not planned on majoring in economics until he took a class with Eau. “She has been a major influence on me in my major.” Now, when he looks ahead another five to ten years, he believes he will be working on a Ph.D. in economics.

“I’m very excited about this award and am thrilled to have the first student that this scholarship helps show the courage to go on to further studies,” said Eau.

She also recognized and thanked Andrew Young School faculty members Jon Smith and Lorenzo Almada for serving on the scholarship review committee.