Why are you an economics major?

Pitt13
Thu, 08 Aug 2013 01:09:12 +0000

I’m an incoming freshman at Purdue for economics. I guess I can try helping out, since no one else has posted.
Why am I majoring in economics? Going into senior year of high school, I believed I wanted to be a lawyer. I wasn’t sure what to do for undergraduate exactly, so my initial gut reaction was business administration. However, I had decided to take AP Economics senior year. Throughout the course of the school year, I absolutely fell in love with it. I loved how logical it all was, how intuitive it could be (It was for me. Not necessarily for everyone), and how useful in real life it could be. Did it help that the teacher I had was amazing? Of course, but sometimes you just need that one teacher you set you on your path.
Now, I’m also planning on minoring in mathematics and philosophy. I never really liked math until my senior year, go figure (also probably because of the teacher). I was in calculus AB, but ended up taking the AP BC test (I also took the macro/micro econ AP tests. 5’s on AB subsection, BC, Macro, and Micro) because I believed that it would help me in the long run to learn as much as I could from this one teacher. I feel very prepared for multivariate calculus in the fall and beyond. My hope is graduate school, but we will see what happens.
What would I use it for? That, I haven’t figured out yet. For whatever reason I absolutely love reading various papers (mainly working papers that are available online), and could very easily see myself doing intense, mathematical economic research. To that extent, I’d be totally happy being a professor. However, I don’t know if I could have enough “Reach” in the world as a professor, so I may be tempted to try other things. Again, I can’t tell you my long term goals… All I know is I love economics (the theory, the math, the everything), and I could very easily dedicate the next 8-10 years of my life to the subject.
I hope that answers your question(s). I kind of just rambled on, sorry!