Jing Li, an assistant professor of applied economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management, stands at the front of the classroom and encourages her undergraduate students to dig deeper. “Why was this a good idea?” she prompts. “How did people come up with these numbers?”
It’s the second-to-last day of class, and the students in 15.0201/14.43 (Economics of Energy, Innovation, and Sustainability) are discussing their teams’ results and the logic behind the decisions they made in the Electricity Strategy Game — a main feature of this elective.
“[With] so much magic,” a student quips in response to Li’s question, to a chorus of laughter.
The real magic, they all know, is in Li’s approach to teaching: She holds her students accountable for their conclusions and throws them head-first into challenging problems to help them confidently engage with the complexities of energy economics.
“She didn’t baby us with tiny data sets. She gave us the real deal,” says...
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