My name is Viktor Tronin. I am a Global UGRAD participant from Russia and I am an economics major at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
I had the opportunity to attend the Nobel Conference in Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota on September 27th – 28th. The focus of the conference was finding economic stability and it featured some very prominent economists like Deirdre McCloskey (PhD Harvard University), who talked about her theory of great enrichment of 19th century in Western Europe, and Dan Ariely (PhD Duke University), who made a terrific presentation questioning the typical economic model of human dishonesty and corruption. Professor Ariely was wearing a suit from Star Wars as he wanted “to talk about the kind and the evil”; it was pretty impressive.
Overall it was an amazing experience and I learned a lot of economic theories that have been helpful in my current academic studies.