July 3, 2023
In this post, I want to highlight some magnificent accomplishments of my Grove City College students.
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Tegan Truitt. You don’t meet a lot of college freshmen who seem more “scholarly” than most professional scholars, but Tegan did. Not many can converse intelligently on Ludwig von Mises, Thomas Sowell, and Michael Polanyi, but Tegan could. Once you toss in his intellectual humility and affability, you have a student who schools would be silly not to hire when he receives his PhD in a few years. At the 2023 Austrian Student Scholar’s Conference at Grove City College, Tegan won the first place prize for his paper, provocatively-titled: “Singapore: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State.” Just a few months later, Tegan won the prestigious Ostrom Prize at the annual Public Choice Society meetings for the same paper. The Ostrom Prize is, “awarded to a graduate student each year for the best-combined paper & presentation at the Annual Meetings of the Public Choice Society.” It should be obvious from these accolades that Tegan is a very promising, young scholar with deep social-philosophical interests.
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Sebastian Anastasi is entering Clemson University’s Ph.D. program this fall. During his undergraduate studies, he won multiple paper awards and submitted a paper to a highly-ranked economics journal (it’s under review…) He graduated summa cum laude while majoring in econ, minoring in math, assisting multiple professors with research, captaining the debate team, and publishing great op-eds. He also won the 2022 Carl Menger Essay Contest and the 2022 Austrian Student Scholar’s Conference first place prize at Grove City College.
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Kurtis Hingl has finished up his first year as a PhD student at George Mason University. Here’s a paper he wrote while an undergraduate in my seminar course.
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Wesley Gaines just completed a master’s degree in the University of Chicago’s MAPSS program. Impressively, Wes published a peer-reviewed paper during his undergraduate studies at GCC. See it here. He is entering UVA’s PhD program in sociology soon.
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Susannah Barnes. When she’s not lighting up the pages of national outlets, she’s working full time for the Mercatus Center and pursuing a graduate degree in economics.
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Benjamin Seevers is entering West Virginia University’s Ph.D. program for the fall 2023 semester. See some of his writing over at Econlib. Ben must also be one of the only college students in America to have won elected office during his undergraduate studies!
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Sam Branthoover is beginning George Mason University’s Ph.D. program in a few months. Sam is a very creative thinker and I’m excited to see the ideas he continues to develop.
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Janna Lu. I’ve lost track of how many languages she speaks fluently. She graduated from GCC summa cum laude in three years. During her undergraduate studies, she produced fascinating research on private firefighting in colonial America. Currently, she’s a first year PhD student at George Mason University.
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Stephanie (Klaves) Mason. Consistently the highest-scoring student on exams in my upper-level courses—and she wasn’t even an econ major. Probably the best economic intuition of anyone I’ve ever taught. Graduated from GCC with a 4.0 GPA, which is notable because the college will routinely go a few years without anyone finishing “perfectly.”
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Jared Kettinger. I know people with econ PhD’s from Princeton, Stanford, Penn, and Harvard, but if I’ve met someone who’s a better natural mathematician than Jared, I was oblivious to it. During his undergrad studies, he made serious progress on a solo-authored book examining the “most beautiful proofs in mathematics.” You can find him getting 100%’s on his graduate exams in mathematics (seriously).
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Micah Quigley. After graduating summa cum laude from GCC, Micah received a law degree from the University of Chicago, where he published this piece in the Chicago Law Review. For one of his undergraduate papers, see page 57 and ff. here.
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Samuel Peterson. Sam won a second-place prize in this competition which was open to any student in the world under age thirty-five.
Keep your eye out for these talented young scholars, and should they go on the academic job market in a few years, snap them up. If one of them wins a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal or ends up on the Supreme Court, remember you saw them here first.