Monday, June 10 through Friday, July 12, 2024
Applications for Summer Scholars 2024 are now closed.
Please check here for more information regarding next year's Summer Scholars program.
We will be hosting approximately 10-15 students for five weeks as Summer Scholars. Summer Scholars get an opportunity to "live the life of the mind" as part of an intensive program from which many participants have subsequently gone on to graduate school and careers in academia. Participants will meet each day from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. to work as research assistants with faculty mentors from the Smith Institute. A sample schedule from last year's program can be downloaded here.
The scholars and their mentors will also meet daily as a reading group to discuss papers in experimental economics, as well as works of economics and philosophy like Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, F.A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order, Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and works of literature like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
Summer Scholars will receive a stipend of $2,500. A limited number of fellowships also include free room and board. Please indicate in your application whether you need room and board to participate.
The program is generously sponsored by the Templeton Foundation.
You will be asked to upload the following essay questions in your application.
- Why are you interested in the Summer Scholar program? (500 words or less).
- What most interests you about the study of economics and/or experimental economics, literature, and philosophy? (500 words or less).
- Do you have any particular skills that you think might contribute to your work? (250 words or less).