This course has been my favorite Econ course and one of my favorite academic experiences at UCLA, not just because that Professor Tornell explained numerous complex concepts in an understanding and exciting approach, but also the fact that we were trying to explain economic activities based on the theories we studied in the course. I love how we discussed news articles during the lab sessions and analyzed the reason behind some of these market phenomena. I was fascinated to see when our theories and analysis correctly predicted the change in the exchange rate when the discovery of the Omicron Covid variant was announced. Econ 123 is the first econ course I had at UCLA that we are incorporating real-time events in the course material, so I feel extremely accomplished and delighted to be able to employ knowledge I learned from this course in real life. I really do recommend taking this class.

Easy A class. Professor Tornell cares about his student and is extremely nice. However, I learnt almost nothing from this class. All the testable materials includes only a few simple formulas which in my opinion can be covered in one class. The course would be better and more informative if Professor Tornell can cover more of how to do coding to perform transactions. He intended to do so and did talk about it a bit in discussion, but those are not at all in depth and I understood almost none of them. I don’t regret taking this class at all, since an easy A with minimal workload is ideal for me when I am busy with other stuff throughout the quarter.