There is stability in independence. That’s the central finding of Mariana Garcia Mejia’s article, Beyond the Border: Rethinking Canada’s Economic Future Without the US. The third-year University College student recently won one of two awards through the Department of Economics Essay Prize in Economic Policy.
“Canada must certainly avoid conflict with its closest partner, but it should simultaneously reimagine its trade landscape to achieve a more stable, independent future’ Mejia wrote.
The award, part of the essay competition associated with the Smith Family Scholarship, recognizes students whose essays stand out for the quality of writing and the application of economics to an important question in public policy. For Garcia Mejia, whose majors are economics and statistics with a minor in mathematics, the creation of the essay involved emphasizing skills outside her immediate comfort zone.
“I don’t have a lot of experience writing, since my majors are much more quantitative,” she said. “I think students in public policy or political science with economics, can write better, but I tried, and it turned out nicely. I used to enjoy writing in high school, so it was nice getting back to it.”
The competition requirements also meant getting to know the economic systems of her host country a little better, including details of its international trade agreements.
“I’ve always been more passionate about macro than micro, and that’s why I decided to make my essay about a macroeconomic issue,” Garcia Mejia explained. “And it also had to be something about Canada. I’m not Canadian, I’m from Colombia, but I am in the process of moving to Canada. Writing this essay meant reading a lot about Canada; its imports, its exports, its main products; and I learned a lot about the country. And I also learned that although Canada faced more losses than the U.S. due to the tariffs, it still has a lot of opportunities to recover and work things around to make new trading partners and experiment with different products.”
Garcia Mejia found out about the essay competition just two weeks before the deadline but wanted to enter even though she had so little time to prepare. The tight timeline, however, pushed her to apply lessons she’d learned in the lecture hall.
“I took Advanced Macroeconomics last semester, and that course connected nicely to this essay,” she said. “You learn things in the classroom, and you wonder, ‘When am I going to apply this?’ We learned about business cycles and topics related to these types of cost shocks, and it all made more sense when I started working on the essay.”
And, Garcia Mejia found, her statistics and mathematics background helped too.
“Something I found really interesting is that you can base yourself in data,” she explained. “My paper mentions statistics; percentages, actual values; and I think maybe that’s my way of putting my quantitative interests into the essay. It’s not just an opinion piece; it is an analysis, but it draws from different sources to show the bigger picture.”
Return to the Department of Economics website.
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