I went to Middlebury College expecting to become a Political Science major. I had law school as a possibility in my mind even as I started college. Or maybe I would be a French major and teach French—I had already concluded already that I would never speak French well enough to be a United Nations interpreter.
When I got to college, I took a lot of Poli Sci courses and also a lot of French and Russian courses. Nevertheless, I decided to be an Economics major. It wasn’t an immediate decision, but considering Economics as a possibility began with my very first college class.
On Monday morning at 8:00am of the first day of my Freshman year, I walked into Introduction to Microeconomics, a 101 class. I took a seat, and a few minutes later, the professor walked in. I’ll call him Professor Smith, because that was his name.
Professor Smith was a crusty old Vermonter who said little and said it quietly. He also had a one-man comedy routine he performed occasionally on campus. In that routine, he came on stage in a large wool jacket, heavy fur cap with earflaps, and one foot in a galvanized steel milk bucket. I remember little about the routine itself, other than it featured the usual jokes about Vermont having three seasons—fall foliage, snow, and mud.
The very first thing Professor Smith said in Introduction to Microeconomics—my very first college class—was “Economics is for lazy people. It’s the study of how to get the most output from the least input.”
I was sold—that sounded to me like a strong philosophy for life.
I’m not sure how disciplined I was in getting the most output for the least input in my early years, but as I balanced work and family issues through my career, I honed in on that philosophy diligently. I focused on doing what I thought was most important in the moment, and ruthlessly abandoned the rest. That’s why I try to reuse work I’ve done previously in new formats. That’s why I quit baking. That’s why I only let my kids choose one sport per season.
And this explains why I declared Economics as my major, and why Professor Smith became my advisor.
I made other decisions around my Economics major in my upper-class years. I took Math for Economists and Statistics as an alternative to writing a thesis, because I thought these courses would require less time. I may have been wrong.
Math for Economists was essentially introductory calculus. I had stopped my high school math classes after Algebra II, and I had no foundation for calculus. I squeaked by that Math for Economists class with the lowest possible A-minus. When faced with taking a final or sticking with the grade obtained from tests during the semester, I stuck with the A-minus. That was good enough for me.
Statistics was easier than Math for Economists, and it even had some practical applications. Later in life, I was extremely proud of myself for figuring out how to calculate standard deviations in SuperCalc (remember that early spreadsheet program?), so I could defend disparate impact claims from the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs when they did affirmative action audits.
What choices have you made based on what might seem like a whim?
P.S. After I drafted this post but before it was published I learned that Middlebury College is extending its spring break this year and switching to remote online classes for the remainder of the spring semester due to the COVID-19 virus. The college has been in existence since 1800. I don’t know of any campus precedents for extended breaks or campus closures, though I don’t know the college’s history that well. Of course, the possibility of remote learning is a recent phenomenon everywhere.
