I am fortunate in so many ways. I have great friends, a loving family, an an intellectually stimulating environment.

One of the ways in which I am fortunate is the quality of the faculty here at West Virginia. When I decided to come to West Virginia, I did so because of Russ Sobel. The quality of the other faculty did not enter my decision-making process. Yet ten classes must be taken in order to take the one graduate course that Russ teaches. It was not clear to me at the beginning that I would make it see Russ's class or how beneficial my experience would be should I make it.

Fortunately for me, the graduate faculty here at West Virginia are excellent teachers. I certainly do not consider myself to be a "macro" guy, but after taking Ron Balver's Macro Theory 1 I feel like I really understand macroeconomics and it is no wonder that our graduates tend to be good teachers of introductory and intermediate macro given that they have all taken his class.

The best graduate faculty member, in my opinion, at West Virginia University is Santiago Pinto. He teaches Math Econ, Dynamic Methods, Micro II, and Graduate Urban. The quality of his teaching in Math Econ was extremely beneficial to me after being away from school so long. With a lesser teacher, I am afraid I would not be typing this today. His careful and detailed explanation of the basic monocentric model in Graduate Urban gave me a newfound appreciation for the usefulness of model building. In addition he is an excellent scholar with a recent publication in the Journal of Public Economics and a couple others in the Journal of Urban Economics. In my opinion his recent receipt of the College of Business and Economics' Outstanding Teacher Award is well-deserved.