It is the time of year for proud parents to gather on university campuses and watch graduation ceremonies.

ii’s Ryan Meyers and John Parker were proud to attend the final presentations of students in ECO 400Y at the University of Toronto last week.

University of Toronto ECO400Y Internship

For the second year in a row ii had a U of T student intern with us.

We watched as senior economics students gave short talks on the projects and research from their internship placements in the business community. The presentations were all very good and we were impressed by the quality and professionalism of these soon-to-be graduates. All were poised, confident in their work and handled questions from visitors and faculty with aplomb. I think all of the mentors present were proud.

Like psuedo-parents, Ryan and I were especially proud of our intern, Ju Li. He helped us do some complicated econometrics using extreme value distribution fitting for over 600 weather stations in the U.S.. He helped us confirm the trends in extreme rainfall data and build that into our models so could account for the impacts of extreme weather on infrastructure. Ju also worked with us on the continuing job of shoring up the database of research that supports AutoCASE and the various versions of the BCE.

It is with great pleasure that we provide a link to Ju’s presentation: Impact_Infrastructure_Ju_Li. We wish Ju well in his career – he is starting at the Ontario Securities Commission on Monday. Our intern from last year is now completing a masters degree in economics at U of T and ii looks forward to mentoring another student next fall.