Matching Markets in ENGRG 1050
The summer before I started at Cornell, the College of Engineering sent out a survey to incoming freshmen asking them to rank their academic interests. We were presented with a list of all 14 majors in the college and given a total of 10 points, which we were supposed to allocate to reflect our interests in different majors. For example, a student extremely interested in Mechanical Engineering would put all 10 points in that category and 0 in all of the others. As a more indecisive student, I split my vote between a few majors that sounded pretty cool.
This did not come up again until ENGRG 1050, a mandatory class for all freshmen engineers. This is a 1-credit course that meets once a week in a group of around 20 to talk about the engineering curriculum and policies, study habits, and other supportive topics. Each section is headed by a faculty advisor, shared by all of the students in a class. As it turned out, students in an ENGRG class tend to share the same major interests, and the advisor is typically a faculty of that department. For example, my interests leaned towards life sciences, so I ended up in an ENGRG full of Biological and Biomedical Engineers and a professor from the Department of Biological Engineering.
So I had unwittingly participated in a matching market long before I knew what they were. The College of Engineering tries its best to match students with an advisor in a field they are most interested in. In class we discussed two characteristics of matching markets – things are allocated to people, and people reveal preferences. Incoming students revealed their major preferences through the survey and were allocated to advisors and an ENGRG section based on that. This is slightly different from the examples we studied in class because one advisor has multiple students. Furthermore, as preferences change over time matchings may end up not fitting as well as they did in freshman fall. However, even as my own interests have changed, I still feel like my first advisor was a great match.