[Kudos]

Econ 4A03 is the final required econ class for honours students. It is intended to be the culmination of all you've learned in your other classes by creating either a comprehensive lit review or an independent research project.

I took this course with Martin Dooley, who is a fantastic prof. The evaluations exclusively focused on your overall project and its progress - a proposal, progress report and final paper and a corresponding presentation at each stage. We also had to lead the discussion for a classmate's proposal presentation and were graded on overall participation (15%).

I strongly recommend creating your own research project for a few reasons. Primarily, you will learn more. A lit review may seem easier because it's just a rehash of 3F03 but it's a lot more reading and a lot less doing. I also suspect that original products are graded a lot easier.

As far as final projects go, pretty much any topic was fair game. People did everything from cigarette taxes to the effects of sport stadiums to the effect of aging on society to microfinancing. I did an original project and it involved gathering data (from Statistics Canada, the World Bank, etc), creating a data set, creating a regression equation (no knowledge beyond 3U03 necessary) and analyzing the results. It was a fantastic experience and I'm glad I did it.

Dooley is the kind of prof who wants you to succeed. He's very encouraging regarding research and provides a lot of good ideas if you ask for them. Additionally, he effectively leads class discussions and manages to teach in a class that doesn't really provide a lot of opportunities to "teach" per se. He's also very willing to write reference letters for strong students.

All in all, this class is not one that you need to be worried about but it is one that should be taken seriously. If you ask for help, you will be given it.