Home / The University / Faculties / Faculty of Economics and Business Administration / News / A visit by Prof. Georgi Mengov and Assist. Prof. Ilia Atanasov at Queen Mary, University of London, Gave the Beginning to the Staff Exchange Between the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration and the University of London

   

15.03.2019

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At the end of January 2019 Prof. Georgi Mengov, PhD and Assist. Prof. Ilia Atanasov from the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration visited Queen Mary, University of London as part of the staff mobility program Erasmus+. They met with prof. Sujoy Mukerji, Dean of the School of Economics and Finance and with his colleague, Assoc. Prof. Asen Ivanov who graduated from Sofia University`s faculty of economics and business administration in 2002.

 

The visit coincided with the period in which interviews were held with prospective full-time lectures of economics and finance. Queen Mary is among the first 120-130 universities in the world`s most prestigious ranking lists which makes it attractive for potential candidates from the whole world. The established practice of hiring new lectures at such high-ranking universities is to select five to six candidates from among the hundreds of applications and to invite them to give a lecture. Each lecture lasts 90 minutes and the people attending can ask the lecturer questions at any moment. The discussion can touch upon the minutest details of the seminar topic and presupposes the high expertise of all participants. It is not surprising that these job market seminars are also known as “the bloody bath”. Prof. Mengov and Ass. Atanasov were impressed by the variety of seminar topics some of which went far beyond the limits of the traditional understanding of economics. Some examples are: "Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians", "Preferences for Competition: Children Versus Parents", "Blockchain structure and cryptocurrency prices". Characteristic for all participants was there substantial economics expertise and the perfect command of econometric methods and techniques.