How I got here.

2018Freshman

It started with a suitcase.

I arrived at Southern Illinois University Carbondale at eighteen, in a country I did not know, with a suitcase my brother helped me carry into University Hall. I could not have told you then what an economics PhD was.

I started in marketing because I liked money. A product is worth nothing until somebody buys it, so how it gets bought looked like a subject worth learning.

What I could not do was the hundred-level requirement. The work there was memorizing definitions and repeating them. I went to my advisor’s office and asked whether I could skip to the three-hundred level, and he said I could. My second semester was a three-hundred-level philosophy course and a biology course on invasive species. Both were over my head and my grades paid for it. I stayed in them because I had come to study, not to protect my GPA.

2019Sophomore

Maybe I could ask him at office hours.

I took a philosophy course that was mostly ontology, which asks what it means for anything to be at all. Said out loud, that sounds like a question nobody should need to ask. The room asked it anyway and never closed it. Until then I had not been anywhere that let a question stay open.

I was afraid to speak in front of people, so I did not. I went to office hours and finished there whatever the class had left open. My professor hinted, more than once, that I could say some of it where everyone could hear. I never did. The fear went away in graduate school and I cannot tell you what took it.

When I plan a class now, I assume I was not unusual. What worked on me was a smaller room, a lower cost to being wrong, and having had the question in advance.

2022Senior

The course I was not supposed to take.

An advisor counted my credits wrong and told me I needed more of them. Two majors and a habit of skipping the introductory level had left gaps on paper. So I spent my last year in introductory philosophy, and I got a C.

Looking back, that course is what makes me take the introductory format seriously. It is usually a core requirement, so the room is full of people who have not picked a major and may never come back. That is the only semester the subject gets with them. Mine spent it on memorization. I can tell you what that costs: if it had been my first philosophy course, I would be selling iPhone Duos in an Apple Store right now.

The same miscount put me in intermediate macroeconomics. A later advisor told me the credits had never been needed and that I could drop the course without losing anything. I stayed. Professor Becsi, who later joined my committee, did not open class with the textbook. He opened with the day’s news out of Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal, found the economics inside it, and taught from there. I had been applying to graduate programs in philosophy. I applied in economics instead.

2022Summer

He told me to learn Python.

Near the end of that semester Professor Becsi told me I might try learning Python, and opened Udemy on his screen to show me a beginner course. About fifteen dollars on sale. He was clear that the money was the easy part and the time was not. I went home and bought the one that ran from beginner to master instead. That summer I worked through it a line at a time.

The first thing I built was a local database of words and a script that put them in front of me one at a time and kept score. It had no interface and it was crude, and I had typed the word list into it myself, by hand, out of a GRE book. My days and nights swapped that summer, and nothing I had made before had felt like that.

2022Graduate school

Both papers are about someone I have been.

The coursework left no room to keep learning code, so I took four DataCamp courses over one break. Everything in my research runs in Python now.

I had also mined cryptocurrency as an undergraduate, and traded futures, spot and perpetuals. That is why my job market paper asks what a holder got rather than what the asset returned. The second project is about occupational mobility and earnings, and I am writing it while I am on the job market myself.

Both papers ask what happens to somebody standing where I have stood.

2024Now

University Hall, again.

In 2025 the Evaluation and Developmental Center, where I have worked since 2024, moved to the floor I had lived on. The rooms still look like dorm rooms with desks in them. I work in one.