A Bachelor of Economics student from The University of Queensland was recently named the regional winner for Oceania in the Undergraduate Awards Program 2017.
Vu Minh Thu Hoang’s winning submission, An Experimental Study of Pigou-Knight-Downs Paradox for Traffic Congestion under a Modified Road Network, was one of over 6000 submissions worldwide and one of 576 from the Oceania region.
The Undergraduate Awards is the world's largest international academic awards programme, recognising innovation and excellence at undergraduate level.
Cited as the ultimate champion for high-potential undergraduates, UA identifies leading creative thinkers through their undergraduate coursework and provides top performing students with the support, network and opportunities they require to raise their profiles and further their career paths.
The Undergraduate Awards allows students to submit coursework, research papers and portfolios across 25 different categories which are then assessed by a panel of international academics and industry leaders.
The third-year student took out the Economics award for Oceania after being ranked in the top 10% of all submissions in her category.
Ms Hoang said her work was originally part of her course assessment.
“The submission to the awards was an assignment of the course Experimental Economics that I took with Associate Professor Lana Friesen,” she said.
"Initially, I wrote about the asset markets but was thinking of changing the research proposal to transportation economics since there were fewer experiments conducted in this area.
“Lana helped me identify the more novel topic between the two, and I felt more confident to re-write a new proposal on transportation despite having finished my draft on asset markets.
“The research question I came up with in my proposal was developed while reviewing literature on transportation economics for Dr Kenan Kalayci’s summer research project, which focuses on another hypothesis.”
As a result of Ms Hoang’s award, her work will be published in the annual The Undergraduate Journal, and she has been invited to the UA Global Summit 2017, an invitation-only event, to be held in Dublin, Ireland later in 2017.
The School of Economics congratulates Ms Hoang on this outstanding achievement.
