Class of 2019 FirstvYear Fellow: Alex Magnuson

Alex Magnuson ’19 grew up in Columbus, Ohio and graduated from Columbus Academy. At Dartmouth, Alex is pursuing a major in Economics with a minor in Geography. He is a member of the Dartmouth Figure Skating and Parliamentary Debate teams, teaches P.E. skating classes to undergraduates, and previously volunteered for the Dartmouth for Hillary Campaign.

For his First Year Fellowship, Alex worked as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution. This took many forms and varied between the qualitative and the quantitative.

He helped provide background research on global events like Brexit, wrote reports on committee hearings, summarized new academic papers, and travelled to different federal agencies to collect information in order to create datasets and construct instruments for ensuring exogenous variation in economic models. 

“The most rewarding part of my internship was the moment when I ran a regression on the dataset that I had constructed and achieved significant results,” recounts Alex.  “It was such a powerful feeling to know that as a result of the countless searches through state records, calls to airport operators, and collection of data I had established a correlation with all but the slightest amount of uncertainty.  The feeling of having a theory, going through the hard work of testing it, and emerging with new knowledge was incomparable to any previous success I had achieved academically or professionally.”

After graduation, Alex plans to attend graduate school and pursue a career in economic research.