July 16, 2018 - CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI)’s Institute for Global Economic Research (IGER) will be examining economic issues closer to home under its new director, Assistant Professor of Economics Miguel Delgado Helleseter, Ph.D.
“The main direction we’re taking is to give IGER more local focus, interact with area Chambers of Commerce who can give us feedback on the business environment,” Helleseter said. “We will then work to provide some insight into the issues affecting them.”
Helleseter succeeds retiring economics professor Sung Won Sohn, Ph.D., whose last day as IGER director was June 30.
“We appreciate his 10 years of leadership, particularly the national and international exposure he brought to the campus and the leadership,” said William P. Cordeiro, Ph.D., Dean of the Martin V. Smith School of Business & Economics.
IGER will also involve more students. When he was attending graduate school, Helleseter was involved with business research and data collection, which he says proved valuable to his career.
“We will give the students more of an opportunity to get their hands dirty, to go out and collect data, rather than just click around the internet,” Helleseter said. “We will have them analyze the data and put together reports. We’ll get students more exposed to how it’s actually done.”
IGER will offer a class that will immerse students in the business community so that they can get a sense of what working in the world of business will be like.
“For the career they want, such as in a consulting environment, they’re going to have to start at the bottom and do firsthand data collection not readily available otherwise,” Helleseter said. “We’re hoping to survey local business and maybe collect data that you just can’t collect on websites. Data tends to be very broad or for the state as a whole, and businesses tend to run on local information.”
Helleseter, who took his position on July 1, is remodeling IGER from the ground up, so it will take time to work out the details, but he hopes to continue the IGER tradition of public presentations. The “global” in the IGER name will come into play when national policy or global events filter down to the local level, affecting economic factors such as housing, interest rates, etc.
“We can’t think of Ventura County in a vacuum, so we will address things happening statewide, nationwide, maybe globally,” Helleseter said.