Five Questions with honours economics student Nicholas Cormier
2011-02-14 09:50:42
Nicholas Cormier, from Lower Sackville, NS, is in his third year of a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Mount Allison’s Ron Joyce Centre for Business Studies.
1- Why did you choose to study business and economics?
In high school I was the treasurer for the students’ council, so I had an introduction to accounting and finance and I found it interesting, but at the time I wanted to be a pharmacist. So I came to Mount A because I knew they had a great Science program and a great business program, so the option to switch was there. One of the requirements for pharmacy was doing some social sciences courses so I took microeconomics, which ended up being by far my favorite class that semester. I took macroeconomics in second semester and I really became engaged with economics. It is all about scarcity and choices with limited resources and essentially doing the best you can with what you have been given. You know you are doing the right thing when you love being in class every day.
2- What is the best thing about being an economics tutorial leader?
You get a chance to refine all of your introductory knowledge in economics, which is great if you are going to grad school. That is the number one thing. The next best thing is you get to practice presenting things that you love to talk about to 20 to 30 students. That is also great for grad school because often the scholarships have a teaching assistantship component, so it is nice to already have two years of experience. Many other universities don’t give you this chance, as it is typically grad students who are the teaching assistants.
3- The Dean wants to know — as you play trumpet in a jazz band — Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong?
Louis Armstrong. But if you were to ask me which trumpet player I liked the most in general, it would have to be Maynard Ferguson who played “screech” trumpet, which essentially just means that he played very high notes.
4- You received a summer undergraduate research award to answer the question “is there a premium or a penalty on the income of those workers who also choose to volunteer?” What got you interested in this topic?
In the last year of high school lots of people apply for scholarships to go to university. The three main criteria were academics, leadership, and volunteer experience. I noticed that people who volunteered received more money in scholarships and I wondered if there were similar labor market outcomes.
5- So, is there a premium or a penalty on the income of those workers who also choose to volunteer?
I discovered there were three ways that the literature suggested volunteering might help you. The first way is through signaling what a person is like. People who volunteer are typically more altruistic.
The second way is through networking. If you work for an organization, then you would typically make more contacts that could help you get a better paying job, or simply increase the number of clients at your current job.
The third way that volunteering could help is through increased experience from volunteer work. The basic stats showed there was a 6.4 per cent premium if you’re a volunteer. We did a little more advanced analysis on the data I had and it reinforced the networking theory.
We used variables like number of hours worked and how many organizations a person worked for. The results showed that the more hours you volunteered, the more your income would decrease, but the more organizations you worked for, the more income your income would increase. To optimize, you would want to work for lots of organizations, but not for many hours. It was a great summer and it was a great opportunity to be able to do research at the undergraduate level.