According to the TFE Times 2024 report, Georgia State’s Master of Arts in Economics is the top program in Georgia. With skilled faculty and forward-looking curriculum, it’s an effective choice for advancing in your career.
David Copeland, a 2020 graduate from the M.A. Economics program, enrolled at Georgia State for that reason. The interests he wanted to pursue in public policy required higher education and more experience.
“I think there's so much more to economics than money,” Copeland said. “The interesting questions that people have about economics and studying issues that are unrelated just to making money. I think you can be interested in economics and not be chasing that as a primary goal.”
His decision to pursue further education at Georgia State brought him to the South for the first time. He was born and raised in New York, attended college in the city, and worked in the economic think tank industry there.
Copeland, looking for a change, applied to public policy PhD programs across the country and settled on Georgia State. Because of the flexible nature of GSU’s offerings, he was eventually able to transition his studies to best fit his goals.
This meant changing course and pursuing two masters degrees – an M.A. in Economics and M.A. in Public Policy.
Experience at GSU
During his time at Georgia State, Copeland worked with the Center for State and Local Finance (CSLF) as a graduate research assistant. He assisted a team of faculty in various projects, one of which examined older adults returning back to school and their career outcomes.
His advisor, Dr. Bart Hildreth, was instrumental in his experience at Georgia State. From Hildreth, Copeland learned the intricacies of public finance and accounting, which were crucial when the time came to apply for jobs.
"I ran the municipal security laboratory, which was a data center that was headed by Dr. Hildreth,” Copeland said. “I dealt with a number of different data sources and those data sources came up later in my career.”
For those interested in pursuing a career in economics, Copeland said that becoming comfortable and skilled in these pursuits was a must. The knowledge of coding software like MATLAB and high-level programming language like Python is something that students often overlook, but having confidence in them can make the difference.
“Especially when you start applying for jobs, that's something that can put you in a different pile,” Copeland said. “There's just no question that that's super important.”
Past the need for hard skills in the field of economics, Copeland believes that the ability to problem-solve is vital. When dealing with data, oftentimes the path toward solving an issue for a client isn’t black and white.
“I think a lot of that’s very scrappy data ability and that was definitely what graduate school was,” Copeland said. “You had to go to a new data source, figure out how it worked and figure out how you could manipulate things,” he said. “I think that was very much honed for me as a student.”
Life after Georgia State
After completing both of his master’s degrees at Georgia State, Copeland moved back to New York. The job market in 2020 was challenging, but his newly refined skills and network of connections helped him in the search.
Copeland accepted a job at Moody’s Analytics where he sold data and worked in data analytics. After a few years, he transitioned to public finance analysis.
During his time at Moody’s, Copeland worked on high-stress projects, dealing with large sums of money. This experience was important for Copeland; it gave perspective of the importance of his work to stakeholders.
“The stakes were very high,” said Copeland. “[Our clients] were borrowing a lot of money and our decision was going to have a direct implication on how much it cost for them to borrow the money. Most times these were pretty stressful sequences of events.”
Copeland is drawn to problem-solving situations, which has led him to a new chapter in his career. After closing out his time at Moody’s, he began working on his PhD at City University of New York (CUNY). His goal after graduating is to work at a public, non-partisan entity, like the World Bank.
With his experience in both the world of higher education and the field of economics, Copeland has seen that attaining success requires the ability to take the story of data and tell it.
“There's no replacement for being able to comprehend and talk about data,” he said. “The people who are really impressive are the people who don't need to describe a bar graph; they can tell you the story behind it. I think that's really powerful.”