Elissa Chrapko is audacious. True to the Oxford Dictionary, Elissa has a willingness to take bold risks. It’s the source of her advice to new undergraduates.
“Be audacious in the pursuit of opportunities,” the newly minted double major in Economics and Public Policy grad said. “Go ahead and send 40-odd emails, go to the networking events. I got to be a research assistant because I met the right professor and talked to him. Do the thing even if the chance of success seems nil. Have fun with it.”
The advice comes from an innate understanding of what is really at risk from asking.
“It’s just like my mother says,” Elissa remembered. “The worst thing that can happen is that they say no.”
The Victoria College student has been told no many times. The yeses, though, make for a great resume. Elissa has worked as both a research assistant and a teaching assistant while at UofT. Being a TA for ECO105 was a particularly meaningful part of her student journey.
“TAing in that course brought me full circle,” she said. “I ended my degree as part of the same class that I started with, the course that introduced me to economics and I learned that I loved it!”
That introduction to economics made for a course correction and a program change. The Alberta farm girl entered UofT determined to study history. Then, she discovered development economics and its mentions of land use and the antitrust implications of corporate development for small rural businesses. Some of her inspiration for further study in the field came from her own family’s experiences completing applications for irrigation permits back on the farm.
“When I looked into the processes and the whys of the policies in place, I learned that you cannot examine economic development without a statistically significant population to draw from,” she explained. “So, if you want to make good policy, but there are not enough people to make a statistically correct decision, how can you make choices that serve communities that just do not function like most ‘average’ large/urbanized spaces?”
As she prepares for her convocation on June 12, Elissa has many ideas floating through her head about potential research projects for the future. One idea she has already seen through the development process was her examination of Indigenous Land Claims as a Fundamentally Economic Issue. The project started as an essay completed as part of a scholarship application that won the 2024 Department of Economics Essay Prize in Economic Policy. Following the success of her essay, Elissa and her co-author Shay Houseknecht developed the paper in ECO499 as an honours essay. It will be published in the upcoming undergraduate Canadian Studies journal ImagiNATIONS. The pair also presented their work at Georgetown’s 24th Carroll Round Conference in Washington, DC in April. Closer to home, they will also deliver the paper at the CEA conference in Montreal at the end of May.
Courses like ECO499 demand a high degree of independence and self-motivation from students who enroll. For Elissa, those demands were part of the appeal.
“I micromanage myself,” she admitted. “I parent myself and organize to get ahead of myself. I create a spreadsheet at the beginning of term with all my due dates and assignments so I can create a work plan.”
Ultimately, that micromanagement helped Elissa learn exactly what she wanted to.
“You have to make your degree work for you, and part of being optimistically audacious is asking to be accommodated,” she said. “We’re all here to do what we love and follow different avenues to get where we want to be. Squeeze every drop out of the experience.”
During a scheduled gap year, Elissa plans to work on several projects on the family farm.
“We have an intense irrigation project to implement and a mocktail business to grow,” she explained. “My whole thread of economics has been about supporting local businesses, building local economies and investigating the antitrust issues and land use issues of rural communities and their infrastructure. So, I am going back to my initial inspiration by returning to my rural roots for the year.”
Elissa’s return to rural life has a meaningful end date. In September 2026, Elissa will be starting an MSc at the London School of Economics.
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