About

Who Am I

I have always been drawn to the social sciences. Long before I knew what economics, political science, or sociology were, I was interested in people: their stories, their choices, the circumstances that shape their lives, and the things that make those lives better or harder.

Helping people has always been one of the most rewarding things for me. I think this is where much of my academic curiosity comes from. I want to understand the world and why it works the way it does.

I am an economics student, but I have never thought of economics as being only about numbers or markets. For me, it became a way of asking questions about people. Numbers, models, and data are tools that help me see what is happening in people’s lives and think more carefully about possible solutions.

I am still deeply interested in social sciences, curious about people’s stories, and trying to understand how we can make the systems around us work a little better!

Finding Economics

My interest in economics became stronger when I began to understand that the numbers I had once viewed as abstract were actually reflections of people’s decisions.

I had always enjoyed working with numbers, but they started to make sense to me when I saw how economics uses quantitative tools to interpret individual choices. I remember this especially when I encountered the applied examples in Pindyck and Rubinfeld’s microeconomics textbook. It was one of the first times I saw how assumptions and equations could be connected to the kinds of choices people make every day.

That connection stayed with me.

During my undergraduate studies, I became increasingly interested in microeconomics, especially questions involving individual decision making and labor. I also realized that understanding these questions well required more than economic theory alone. Alongside my economics coursework, I took additional courses in statistics to build a stronger quantitative foundation.

The more I studied, the more questions I found!

Some interests developed into projects. Others led me somewhere completely different and remained unfinished. I discovered new areas, changed my mind about some of them, and gradually learned what kinds of questions continued to interest me after the course or project was over.

I also began to experience research from different angles. I worked as a teaching assistant, conducted research, and developed experience working with data and statistical methods.

From People to Data

Somewhere along this process, I realized something important about what I was looking for.

The questions I cared about were fundamentally about people. Mathematics and data gave me a way to see those questions in the real world.

Data allows me to move from asking what people might do to examining what they actually do. I can look for patterns, test explanations, and investigate whether the things we believe about human behavior hold up when confronted with evidence.

For me, quantitative methods are not an end in themselves. They are a way of getting closer to questions about people.

Why Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies

I am now pursuing an MA in interdisciplinary graduate studies at the University of British Columbia.

In some ways, this is a departure from the more traditional path of an economics student. In another sense, it feels like a natural continuation of everything I had been interested in before.

Interdisciplinary graduate studies gives me the opportunity to bring together economics, political science, and philosophy while allowing me to keep economics at the centre of how I approach many questions.

My interest in human behavior and the possibility of making things better has remained at the centre of my work. Along the way, I have simply found more questions to ask, and more ways to approach them!

Where I Am Now

My current interests are centred on applied microeconomics, labor economics, and public policy.

My work sits at the intersection of economic questions and empirical evidence. I enjoy the process of turning a broad question into something observable, building the data needed to study it, and using quantitative methods to understand what is happening beneath the surface.

My undergraduate years were largely about discovering questions. My graduate work is about figuring out which of those questions I want to spend more of my life answering.

I am still interested in people. I still love the human sciences. And I am still a future economist. :)