Brendan O'Flaherty

Professor O’Flaherty is a bit eccentric and a bit older, both of which can be endearing as he navigates a younger student body. I appreciated his tangents and general knowledge that he easily applies to course material. I also appreciated the open source course materials. I will say that he was one of the few professors that took the time and effort to talk to students on their own time about the challenges they faced. I’ll always remember him fondly for that. That being said, he’s a harsh grader. I’d studied for a multiple choice final, only for it to be swapped out with an extended problem set last minute. Overall, nice guy, very intelligent with a wide array of real world experience.

The course material itself is interesting, but Professor O'Flaherty is painfully boring. I could barely hear him and had to sit at the front of the class, though I stopped going to class after awhile. He is knowledgeable, but a very, very boring lecturer who makes awkward jokes. He also was not very helpful if you asked questions. By the end of the semester, very few students were attending the class.

This was the only interesting class I was taking this semester. I would love going to class, Brendan is a funny professor and very laid back. Urban economics, is a very interesting topic, and the class is very doable compared to other Columbia College classes out there! btw you will def. Definitely take this class if you are taking other core classes like Econometrics or int. micro those are though classes. this class is fun and easy. The only problem with the class, is that sometimes you will feel lost trying to do the problem sets which are pretty weird, but if you take into consideration that the p.sets are every 2 weeks, kind of short and you can do them in teams is not bad trust me....

holistically thinking about different policy issues and the economic intended and unintended consequences of policy decisions.

How to apply quantitative and qualitative skills from core econ classes to criminal justice.

God awful class. So uninteresting and hes really not a good teacher in the slightest. Id say the hardest part of this class is trying to interpret the questions he is asking. We have weekly problem sets and occasional open-book quizzes that are sooooooo badly written that not even the internet will help you (and looking at old reviews this seems to be a consistent issue with his class). His questions are often unclear and riddled with ridiculous hypotheticals which require you to hop skip and leap to far-fetched conclusions. When trying to answer these questions, I often found myself thinking more about whether or not this is the type of answer he is looking for rather than thinking about the econ concept itself. The class is curved to a B- which sucks and we are graded on a z-score relative to how other people in the class do. There is literally no clear communication about z-scores or cutoffs or anything. They never gave us our final z-score and didn't release our graded finals on gradescope/the answer key for the final so we can't even see or understand how we got to the letter grade we received.

I've never done a CULPA review, but Professor O'Flaherty is such a wonderful human being and professor that it had to be done. Professor O'Flaherty is one of the best, most eccentric professors I've ever had. He always takes the time to answer questions, and I really appreciate that his class was super discussion-based. Whenever someone would not understand something, he would frame it in an interesting context/example sometimes involving oak trees and cats or witches for folks to better understand. This class has defined my undergraduate experience. This is the best course I've ever taken in my four years of undergrad. I recommend this course to anyone who wants to understand how race plays a significant part in all our daily interactions, major life milestones, and institutions. The studies he shares in his book and in class are fascinating. Also, his book, Economics of Race in the U.S., is hilarious and very readable. One note of improvement for the professor though is that I recommend he speak louder into the microphone (or clip the microphone closer to his mouth) since he can be quite soft-spoken at times. Make sure to sit in the front row if you want to hear him more clearly and ask him to repeat stuff if you miss anything, he won't mind. Just to show you how amazing and ridiculous he is: For our take-home midterm he emailed: "you may use books and the internet and plant…

This is a poor excuse for a course. O'Flaherty is an extremely boring lecturer, he speaks really quietly, and he is a bad teacher. This is reflected by the fact that the classroom was always pretty empty. The material could be interesting, but his dry, long-winded lectures made it torturous. His textbook is definitely clearer than his lectures, but it is also unnecessarily long. O'Flaherty is surely well-intentioned; he really cares about the course and its material. However, this does not make up for the fact that he is incompetent at teaching. He has a tendency to gloss over important concepts very quickly, but he will spend far more time talking about a table that hardly matters at all. This is a very easy econ elective, but I would highly recommend staying away. It is easily the worst class I've taken at Columbia.

Practical advice plus a whole new perspective for many real world problems

criminals justice in real economic terms