MABE candidate pursues her dream of becoming an economist

By Suzanne Bowness | May 14, 2024

Poised to start her co-op term as a junior analyst at Service Canada, the pathway has been a bit serendipitous for Zainab Shina-Wahab, as she hadn’t even been thinking about doing her master’s degree until one of her professors had recommended that the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics Master of Arts in Business Economics (MABE) might be a good fit. After attending an information session and one-on-one consultation with program coordinator and professor Wing Chan, she agreed.

With two semesters of courses, a co-op option, and a master research project, the MABE program prepares students for careers as economists and is endorsed by the Canadian Association for Business Economics. Program coordinator Wing Chan notes that 75 percent of students go into the co-op program, and half of graduates end up working for government in departments such as the Ministries of Transportation or Natural Resources, while others end up in the private sector working for insurance companies and banks. The Master Research Project (MRP) is a standout feature of the program, and students are invited to propose topics of interest to them. Past MRP papers have focused on areas such as international trade, the environment, economic zones, and transportation.

Having completed her two coursework terms, Shina-Wahab says she liked all her courses, but especially microeconomics for its real-world applications and for the various industries that incorporated into the learning by Professor Steffen Ziss. She is also enjoying a course in second semester called Forecasting, Time Series Analysis, and Survey taught by professor Stephen Snudden.

Even before she became a graduate student, Shina-Wahab had already taken advantage of many opportunities offered by Lazaridis. As an undergraduate, she was a Laurier Economics Club mentor in her fourth year, wrote an undergraduate thesis on the impact of racial disparity on sentence length in the US, and took on a research assistantship with Professor Juan Morales that focused on how social media affected voters in the US election.

She continued the research assistantship into her master’s degree and has additionally spent the past term as a teaching assistant for an econometrics course taught by professor Chan. She also attends various seminars held by the economics department where professors share their research—she’s looking for inspiration for her own major research paper.

Shina-Wahab embraced other additional opportunities in her graduate program. She participated in a student competition hosted by professor Justin Smith responding to the challenge of predicting immigration levels in Canadian census subdivisions. Shina-Wahab and her teammates Rui Sun and Hari Patel came in third out of fourteen teams by the end of the first semester.

Shina-Wahab also participated in a policy paper competition sponsored by the Toronto Association for Business and Economics. Collaborating in a team with two other students, Hari Patel and Hridita Raihan, she wrote a policy proposal on combatting wildfires in Ontario. “It was fun, being able to think on the spot,” says Shina-Wahab. “In any professional setting, you’re going to be given the task to come up with policy at the last minute, so it felt very real-world.” She adds that mentoring from her professors also made the team feel supported.

After graduation, Shina-Wahab hopes to become an economist, possibly at her co-op if it’s a good fit, or elsewhere. Either way, she feels prepared to take on the challenge, and driven to contribute. “I’ve always been passionate about political and development economics. I want to become an economist because can help to make a difference in Canadian lives,” she says.