Looks like that I’m not allowed anymore to attend grad classes at the Math and the Computer Science departments.

For a person who attended pretty much all my courses (higher education level) in Econ departments (either in US or in Brazil), I really enjoyed the view of the other side of the fence.

Each department and study field has its own way of thinking and solving problems. The approach to acquire knowledge and skills also differ quite a bit, even though these three fields (Economics, Mathematics and Computer Science) are not that apart from each other.

One thing is pretty clear. They evaluate differently students:

• Econ: We love exams. Everything boils down to a theory and, indeed, exams is one of the best ways to assess knowledge acquired.

• Math: same thing, with a lot of homework!

• Computer Science (CS): Why exams if you can work in projects? Each one of them them may take weeks (or months?!). For a Data Mining class, the final project took me several weeks of coding. Machine Learning, had several small ones and a big project at the end.

A final word: it’s clear the relation of Economics and Mathematics (especially Statistics). No doubts about this claim. What is not that evident, and fortunately is changing fastly, is the importance of CS for modern economics. CS skills is for economics today, what math was in the begning of 20th century. Don’t cry, just code the algorithm! :)