A team of Holmdel High School seniors recently had the chance to participate in the High School Fed Challenge, a competition designed to bring real-world economics into the classroom.
Students in the school’s Advanced Placement (AP) Economics course seized the opportunity that this competition provides to further explore their interests in the financial field and put the skills developed in the classroom to work.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the High School Fed Challenge is “a competition designed to bring real-world economics into the classroom.” Team members take on roles as monetary policymakers, analyzing economic conditions and recommending monetary policy.
Holmdel High School was represented by four seniors from Social Science teacher Sal Guastella’s AP Economics class — Jenny Chu, Jennifer He, Brian DeSousa and Michael Stefany.
The students received high praise from the interviewers, who are senior Federal Reserve Bank of New York economists, according to Guastella.
The first day of the competition, according to Holmdel High administrators, involved a series of presentations by the pros who helped students engage in developing their team’s economic forecast, which they presented on the following day. Presentations were followed by a series of questions from the economists designed to test the team’s knowledge and acumen on the topic.
The four Holmdel seniors are waiting to hear if they will advance to the next round out of the 60 teams that they competed against.
Stefany described the competition as “a great way to apply what I had learned in the classroom in a real-world context.”
He also said that he appreciated the “opportunity to take on the challenge of analyzing current economic conditions in order to develop a forecast and recommend a monetary policy response to the Federal Reserve.”
Stefany’s teammate, DeSousa, felt that the competition allowed him to “go beyond the classroom and truly apply the lessons from AP Economics to the real world, particularly in analyzing data about our current economy and how data can be used to predict future trends.”
He also noted that he initially had doubts about being prepared for the event, but afterwards suggested that a typical Holmdel student who had taken the school’s rigorous AP course would be comfortable competing.