Myers on Educating Economics Students, SAS Global Forum Proceedings

I am an Award Winner, educating economics students with SASI am a presenter, educating economics students with SAS

This year the SAS Global Forum canceled for good reasons. I was looking forward to walking amongst the cherry blossoms with my wife Kimberly. I remain excited about the opportunity to speak to SAS Educators about educating economics students and to highlight our SAS partnership at the University of Akron, College of Business Administration, Department of Economics. Thanks go to Josh Horstman for his invitation on behalf of the Global Forum Content Advisory Team.  I missed meeting up with all of the great people of the SAS Global Academic Programs including Lynn Letukas, director, and Rochelle Fisher, our program manager for the University of Akron. 

I had hoped to expand friendships with colleagues met and those to be met and those who I have met only online.  And, perhaps most of all, I am disappointed that I missed being presented with the 2020 SAS Distinguished Educator award. 

Honored and humbled

I am still honored and humbled by the 2020 SAS Distinguished Educator award and recall the congratulatory call from Lynn with the same original shock and pleasure. Also, I am honored to be invited to speak at the SAS Global Forum. Thanks to all involved, especially the conference chair, Lisa Mendez, who worked so hard to coordinate this gigantic global event. I was pleased to meet her at SCSUG and hear so much of the news about the upcoming event.

My Published Paper

Nevertheless, I want to announce that my paper is now published in the 2020 SAS Global Forum Proceedings. My paper titled Show Me the Money! (thanks to Josh for that part) Preparing Economics Students for Data Science Careers is embedded below and a link to download is on the floating menu bar. The paper is a combination of my journey over my four-decade career and description of our programs and SAS use in the Department of Economics and why economists make great data scientists.

If you take time to read it I would appreciate any feedback you have. We can discuss curriculum or whatever, and I hope to leave this as I retire from UA as a roadmap for faculty that follow.

Click to access 4705-2020.pdf

Enjoy and please contact me to discuss.

Other posts on educating economics students with SAS

Please check out other SAS education-related blog posts. A few examples of educating economics students:

SAS Boot Camp
SAS Coding, Problem Based Learning and preparing economists for data science careers: frustration to elation
SAS Certificate in Economic Data Analytics
Economic Freedom: Solve Problems, Tell Stories
Importance of Economic Analysis to Data Science

Data Scientist Jobs Are Increasing For Economists: Evidence from the AEA

Economists, especially Econometricians, are in hot demand in the field of Data Science. Last March I posted Amazon’s Secret Weapon:  Economic Data Sciences which was one of many similar articles on the high demand. It is the entire premise of this blog and my work at university is to highlight this and point economists and our business data analytic students in that direction. Our curriculum is centered on SAS because having the students learning to program at a base level and to learn the power of SAS is a good basis for future job employment (see Data Analytic Jobs in Ohio – May/June 2019).

Because we are looking for a couple of PhD economists for tenure track positions, I thought to wander around in JOE (Job Openings for Economists) and eventually wandered into wondering how many Data Science jobs were directly advertising in the JOE competing with academic positions (including ours). 

So to sharpen my SAS SGPLOT skills i collected some data and found that indeed Data Scientists are in increasing demand over time in JOE , bur not as much as exists in the general market of Indeed.com.  Clearly in JOE job listings in the August to December timeline are the best time to find a data science job, and August 2019 should grow as more jobs are added leading up to the ASSA meetings in San Diego in January. If you’re there look me up, but I suspect I will be in an interviewing room from dawn to dusk. 

Enjoy! Comments welcomed. 

 

Updated to final 2019-2020 numbers
Preliminary 2019-2020 numbers
What do you think about the SGPLOT?
5/5

For those wanting to see the SAS code

My apologies, Elementor does not handle txt code so well, or I have not yet figured that out. (Small amount of research shows the lack of a code widgit  is a problem with Elementor.)

Code with data and image are available at https://github.com/campnmug/SGPLOT_Jobs

data ds;
input date MMDDYY10. total DStitle NotDStitle;
t=_n_;
Datalines;
2/1/2014 0 0 0
8/1/2014 2 2 0
2/1/2015 0 0 0
8/1/2015 5 2 3
2/1/2016 1 1 0
8/1/2016 11 5 6
2/1/2017 1 1 0
8/1/2017 12 6 6
2/1/2018 2 1 1
8/1/2018 14 11 3
2/1/2019 7 4 3
8/1/2019 12 6 6
;
run;
Title1 bold 'Data Scientist Jobs Are Increasing For Economists: Evidence from the AEA';
Title2 color=CX666666 'Advertisement for Data Scientists in Job Openings for Economists (JOE)';
title3 color=CX666666 "Counts shown are the result of a search of all listings for 'Data Scientist'";
proc sgplot;
vbar date / response = total discreteoffset=-.0 datalabel DATALABELATTRS=(Family=Arial Size=10 Weight=Bold)
legendlabel="Total Data Scientist Jobs" dataskin=gloss;
vbar date / response = DStitle transparency=.25 discreteoffset=+.0 datalabel DATALABELATTRS=(Family=Arial Size=10 Weight=Bold)
legendlabel="Job title is 'Data Scientist' " dataskin=gloss;
yaxis display = none ;
xaxis display = ( nolabel);
inset "To put this in perspective:" " "
"Most 'Data Scientist' and 'Economist' jobs"
"are not advertised in JOE"
"A search for 'Economist' and 'Data Scientist'"
"on Indeed.com yields 514 jobs on Oct 14, 2019"
/ position=topleft border
TEXTATTRS=(Color=maroon Family=Arial Size=8
Style=Italic Weight=Bold);
inset "Aug 2019" "preliminary"
/ position=topright noborder
TEXTATTRS=(Color=black Family=Arial Size=8
Style=Italic );

format date worddate12.;
footnote1 Justify=left 'JOE listings are at https://www.aeaweb.org/joe/listings';
footnote2 Justify=left 'Only active listings in either the Aug-Jan or Feb-Jul timeline were searched.';
footnote3 Justify=left 'Search conducted on Oct 14, 2019, so the last count will grow as new jobs are entered into the system.';
footnote4 ' ';
footnote5 Justify=left bold Italic color = CX666666 'Created by Steven C. Myers at EconDataScience.com' ;
run;
run cancel