ABSTRACT
Math was my thing. I was fortunate to go to a high school in Virginia that offered advanced courses in calculus and matrix algebra, and I did well in those classes. So, majoring in math at the University of Richmond seemed like the logical path to follow. However, math was about all that I was interested in when I started college. By the end of my sophomore year I had completed my major requirements in math as well as my minor requirements in physics. The next step was to satisfy the university’s core requirements; U of R is a liberal arts college. By my junior year I had grown an appreciation for the humanities and social sciences, so I began to dabble across the spectrum, constrained only by area requirements and a four-year time constraint. These explorations ranged from Pavlov to production possibilities and from the New Testament to neoclassical thought. In my senior year, with only a rudimentary understanding of supply and demand under my belt, I decided to give graduate studies in economics a try at Tulane University in New Orleans. Perhaps in the back of my mind was that a break from math would be a nice change. Little did I know at the time how useful my math background would prove to be.
